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Employment is a Form of Ownership

Exactly a week later, I slip out of bed before the sun has risen. I make a small parcel of clothes, my purse of crowns, and the small book about the West Indies that I stole from Captain Read’s library. I cannot very well leave in my livery, so I unfold from its storage the winter coat Mrs Read provided for me shortly before her death, which has a good lining, and deep pockets. The coat of a young gentleman. I wonder how long it will be before it looks like the coat of a beggar. Probably not more than a night or two sleeping somewhere unsavoury. But so long as it has the ring of money to it, I might be able to find myself a new position of some kind. But the coat, which was given to me with growing room, no longer fits. It is short in the arms and tight across my back. It will button up only under duress, the buttons straining to burst back out of their holes. I wear it open, rather than look too large for it, though that might prove unsatisfactory against the weather. The shoes I arrived in from Mrs Read’s are an even worse case, being now so small that I cannot get my feet into them. Thinking Demoiselle would not be pleased if I walked off with my dress shoes, and might even accuse me of thieving, I put on my everyday shoes, which are scuffed from running messages. I leave a note of apology addressed to Demoiselle on the table.

The streets are slushy, what’s left of the snow grey with the filth it has sucked from London. Not wishing to work too close to Demoiselle’s domain, I traipse towards Holborn.

At the first house, the servant who answers looks me up and down and asks my business.

‘Gainful employment,’ I say. ‘A position.’

‘What can you do?’ says they.

‘I am an experienced Footboy,’ I say, ‘but I can do anything that might be useful,’ and I see the eyes catching on my coat and then on my shoes. Coat and shoes. And then looking at my face hard as if they hope the sheer strength of that look will unscrew the lid of it and get to whatever sourness might be stored inside me. The lid doesn’t come off for them, and they won’t trust something they can’t open and taste for themselves.

‘There’s no work here,’ comes the answer, and the door is closed. And I look at my coat and my shoes for myself, and I see what might have alarmed them. My shoes are not of the best, being a little worn, but the coat is a gentleman’s coat, and though it is not new and perhaps five years past the fashion, it is not yet sullied by my sleeping in it. So what, they might think, is a person in scuffed shoes doing in a gentleman’s coat, and does this young man think himself above his station or worse, is it a dead gentleman’s coat, and is the person inside it a crook or a swindler, even a murderer, come to murder the Master or Mistress in their very beds should they be fool enough to let him in under the pretext of employment? I discount this as my own imagination until I have tried another door and had the same pickle-jar look thrown at me.

On my short journey up the carriageways of the next several houses I take off the coat, despite the inclement weather, and fold it carefully, stowing it somewhere where it will not be seen (inside a hedge, if a hedge will accommodate, or over a gatepost if it does not look likely to be swiped by a passing good-for-nothing), and take some spit to my shoes and see if I can’t buff them up a bit. Knock on the door again. A servant answers again. Me: gainful employment? Them: look at me coatless, shoes not of the best, and is that smeary look spit not polish?

‘Where is you come from this morning,’ they say.

‘From Mayfair,’ says me.

‘Without a coat?’ says them.

Here I have choices. I was robbed of my coat, I say only once, because a person that can be robbed of their coat and shows no sign of injury cannot be trusted to protect other things that may not belong to them, like a master or mistress’s house. I left it with a friend, I say more than once, and get different responses, but generally a quizzicality either over the friend or the why of it, and the more I try to explain the more the lie itself becomes as sore and throbbing as a toe caught against a door jamb until I must dispense with any idea that a liar with no good reason to have left a coat with a friend would be employed in any household. Finally I try on, instead of a coat, that I do not own a coat. This at least has the possibility of provoking a wisp of pity in the listener, though I sense also that they wonder why a person would get to be almost grown up without having a coat, and what kind of position I could have come from to not have been provided with a coat, and whether that lack of provision was due to my being a bad servant or the master being a bad master, but either way it is not their position to provide for a charity case, which a person without ownership of a coat (in the midst of a still-cold season) must surely be. In all versions of my coatless adventure I find that even shivering (which does not have to be acted but instead comes as a natural consequence of coatlessness) bears no fruit at all.

A new approach. I don the coat, and prepare my mouth with a story, which I have constructed in thirty minutes walking round and round the streets half talking to myself: a story that has sufficient truth in it to carry my being on it as a wave carries a ship. Almost as soon as the door is opened, but fractionally after gently asking if they have need of a new servant in their household, I say, the moment their eyes light upon it, I can tell you are wondering about the coat. I adopt for myself an almost Irish swagger, of the kind I have seen played out in The Three Tuns. It is a very fine coat, is it not, I say, which was a present from my last young master, as a thank you for my service. He had outgrown it, see, and being as he was going to join the army and I was no longer needed in the household, he gave it to me for my leaving. Look at the fine stitching! (I like them to know that I can appreciate fine stitching). And with the coat question answered before it can be asked, and with half a truth balancing between us (because it was indeed a gift), and with no pretend friends needing invention and no shivering as a distraction, we are able at last to lean more heavily on the reason for my knocking, and the question of my employability.

The truth still holds that very few households are in need of new servants. In several hours I find only two that might consider employing me. Nevertheless we then get to the next hurdle, and sad to say it is the final hurdle, the one over which I cannot leap. A letter of recommendation from my previous employer is that hurdle. And of course I have no such thing. I suppose it is foolish of me not to have considered this. But being only fifteen I have never yet needed to find my own work. My position with Demoiselle came through the good word of Mrs Fredericks to Cook, but according to Cook, Mrs Fredericks, not finding the new Reads at all to her liking, has gone to live with her sister in Derbyshire.

Hungry as I am now, I leave the finer streets and find a tavern that offers a good-smelling broth at a reasonable price. I order an ale while I’m waiting for it, figuring that any beery smell on my breath will be smothered by the broth. While I chew on the bread that came with my broth (and it is undoubtedly chewy), I wonder whether it is time for me to be a woman. Whether a woman would find employment more easily. Women, being seen as more naturally biddable, are more favoured as servants, and perhaps they would be less likely to ask for a letter of recommendation if I were in a dress, and with some piteous story of being put upon and mistreated. Especially if the one hiring me were a man who took a shine to me.

The question is not whether I would be more employable as a woman, but whether I could bear to live as one. Looking about the tavern, the only women I can see are those who are doing the serving. Serving food and drink, at this hour, though no doubt later there might be one or two who are serving themselves. But all women bar the very rich are locked into some kind of servitude, whereas the men, even if they be of the poorest sort, seem bound only unto themselves, and at least have the freedom to be customers of this tavern without anyone thinking ill of them. So once my food has gone down, I decide to ask for what has been asked of me, supposing that it will not trouble Demoiselle too much to provide a letter of recommendation.

But I am mistaken. It troubles Demoiselle very much.

‘What is this?’ she says, waving my apology about in the air by its corner. ‘What is this?’

Her outrage is such a surprise to me that I cannot immediately answer.

‘What is this!’ Demoiselle says again, my letter still hostage in her hand.

Even though I know the only true and direct answer will be taken as impertinence, I cannot think of a better answer, so I say,

‘A letter.’

‘A letter, a letter,’ she repeats, mocking me. ‘I know this. What do you mean, you are leaving? Last week I pay for the best doctor in London to make you well and now you are leaving? Explain, please!’

I do not think she means the please. She is used to having her way in all things, as the wealthy are. She has not even been crossed in love: she is wooed by half the bachelors in London and laughs at them behind her hand, in private drawing rooms with Lady Susan.

‘Explain! Do I not treat you well? Do my friends not treat you with — with generosity?’

Demoiselle de Vaucresson teaches me in this small lesson how I am not the free person that I thought I was, but belong to her, and that my running away is as shocking to her as if her chaise longue had stretched its little feet and waddled out the door on them. She continues raging. She lost her last Footboy to the war, and she could do without him as he was not of the best, but me, I cannot be spared. For what possible reason could I want to leave?

It’s true that I do not want to leave, and were my hand not forced by her physician, then I would not do so. I cannot tell her that. All I can tell her is that I must leave for personal reasons. A phrase she repeats, furious with curiosity,

‘Personal reasons? What personal reasons?’

I am so exhausted by her emotion that I cannot even find the strength to lie to her. I ask weakly for a letter of recommendation. At which she explodes again, saying she could never recommend someone so secretive, so obstinate, so disloyal.

A darkened sky marks the end of door-knocking time. One who knocks now is shadowed and their business more like the devil’s business. And with the sun gone to bed the air sheds any small heat it held and I am glad of my coat, now done up and straining at its buttons. The first stars appear to show me only one thing: there is, for the first night in many years, no roof over my head, and no easy way of getting one. But at least in my male attire, and out of livery, I can be out upon the streets without anyone wondering who I belong to. Belonging to myself is all that I wish for myself, and if I could find just the smallest way of putting a mattress beneath me and a roof above me and a crust of bread in my hands, I would be the happiest person in London.

For much as I have spent the day tramping from door to door and hawking myself as though I were pots and pans, I have been the captain of my vessel. I have chosen my direction and speed, my angle of attack, and whether to go in full sail. The words issuing from my mouth have been words I have chosen, and not the answers to a tutor’s questions, or politenesses to soothe a pretended grandmother, or utterances designed to serve and please a mistress. I have behaved how I’ve wished to behave, and not in the manner that Mrs Read would have found pleasing or that Cook would not report. I have been the author of myself, and if whatever scrap of my life I have written this day has been, in the end, something to screw up and burn in a stranger’s grate, at least I have learned what I should not write tomorrow. I am free of algebra and eating chard, and I am free of running messages and errands, and all I need focus on now is how to sustain myself. Perhaps I am not destined to be a servant after all. Perhaps there is another way.

But where to be, or go? How to feed and shelter myself? And more pressing, where might I sleep tonight? I chew on these questions with my back against a broad leafless tree in King’s Square, an icy February rain beginning to spatter onto the branches. And the answer that comes to me is Jim. Jim who knows what to do in any unusual corner, as he has so often needed to trick his way out of them. I should find Jim.

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Fakers Will Always Be Discovered

Jim doesn’t join up. Sometimes a quart of beer makes him a soldier but then it wears off and he keeps with his lacings. Another winter comes, and it’s a fierce one. A wind that’s sharp as grit on the face, followed by three weeks of deep snow, and birds falling dead out of the trees in St James’s Square. There is no hiding from what it brings on its coat tails, either. Pestilence, as Mister Thomas says biblically. What this means in real language is the smallpox, which grabs Fred the butcher’s boy first, and while it still has Fred by the throat, it collars one of Kate’s more ardent suitors to add to its furnace, and then Kate herself. Cook says she herself had it as a girl, which means she will not have it again, but it will burn them all up, all the young people, with a looking to me that seems almost hopeful. Demoiselle, afraid for her health, banishes me from within a breath of Kate’s room, so that I might continue to serve her safely. She has Cook scrub the scullery and pantry and anywhere Kate has touched in recent days, in case she has left some trace of the pestilence there. Even the sheets Kate most recently washed, Demoiselle has re-washed by Cook herself, though Cook grumbles very loudly about it, saying she is not obliged to do housework, but nevertheless pocketing the crown she is given to do so. Demoiselle will not have any more of her staff made ill by this tedious disease, she says, and not a one of us will be carried off if she can help it. Cook mutters that smallpox is no respecter of rank. The queen’s two daughters died of it many years ago.

I am spared the smallpox. Fred the butcher’s boy dies, as does Kate’s suitor. Kate recovers her health. But the glowing loveliness of her skin, her singing of songs at the tub, have gone. I seem unscathed.

But the winter will have its way with me, and one day in the sharp tail of February, I become sick. My day is not the best to begin with, as it is my time, and my cramps are harder and heavier than usual, and I have no excuses at my elbow: cannot say this is a delicate time, a lady’s day, my Flowers as Kate sometimes says, so am expected to do my errands as usual. In the afternoon Demoiselle is determined that I should come with her to St James’ Park where she is meeting her friend, Lady Susan, for a turn around the gardens, to stretch her legs as she says with the delight that foreigners have for another language’s expressions. I am to stay close by in case I am needed.

When we return I am ready to curl into a ball, the clawing in my belly having grown only fiercer for me ‘stretching my legs’. But there is something more. My head is beginning to pound. A fever is already coming upon me. At supper I push my vegetables about my plate and ask to be excused. Mister Thomas informs Demoiselle, and Demoiselle is so concerned that her first thought is to call her physician to attend me, but I say only that I am tired, and need rest, hoping that to be true.

What I fall into next is a confusion. Something between sleeping and waking, with loud sounds in my ears but not in the air, and a heat in my breathing, and thoughts that bump into one another like a crowd running fearfully in all directions. Some of those thoughts make things that have colour and substance, and butt up against the bedstead, so that even my heartbeat or the light of the moon through the curtains is turned into something I could hold in my hands. I can hardly unthread these fever dreams from the realness of Kate coming in to scold me, the light piercing the curtains like a dragoon’s sword, right through the skull of me. Then the room is awash with words, some from Kate and some from Mister Thomas, and some sounding in my head that have no relation to either, and soon enough Cook in her chemise, fussing and fidgeting. She puts her desiccated hand over my forehead and then on my neck, and I hear her clearly, as though her touch has cleared a path for her words. ‘Oh goodness, no,’ she says, ‘the mumps, that’s surely the mumps,’ and she is off away again, and some time afterwards, how much I cannot tell (for as much might happen in my head in half an hour as might happen in a week) there is a tinkling of the doorbell and a man’s voice in the hallway. This voice swims up to me through all the nonsense voices my own head is practising, and suddenly I know very well this must be the doctor come to lay his hands on me.

And there is the horror of it. Why did it not occur to me earlier? I can only blame the fever itself, which is threading so much nonsense through my head that I can follow barely a string of it. If he only inspects my head and neck in the manner of Cook I will be safe, but from what I have heard, doctors will always try to see a person naked, so as to see how much of the body is participating in the sickness, and if this one is intent on seeing beneath my nightgown, I will be utterly undone.

The need for flight has knocked my whole tangled feverhead into a bucket of cold water. Where can I hide or run to? There is only the tallboy, full of drawers, and the curtains that will not cover my feet. There is no coming out of the room because they are already on the stairs. I tuck the blanket tight across my chest. An actorly-looking man comes in with Demoiselle herself.

‘Here’s the patient,’ he says. His hand is very cold on my arm for being so recently out of doors. ‘Mademoiselle tells me you are the grandson of Mrs Read of Coleman Street. A very good family. I attended your grandmother myself once, it must have been four years ago, not long after I had finished my training, when her usual physician, Dr Hartington, was out of town on business. She had that fine Tudor armoire, did she not? I am fond of antiquities and always notice fine pieces.’

He seems to be speaking to no one at all. Certainly not to me.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I can see right away that you’re correct, Mademoiselle de Vaucresson, that looks like a very clear case of the mumps.’

Oh, if just the sight of my swollen face might be enough! But his hand is now on my forehead, first front and then back, and now on my cheeks, front and back, and now on my neck, the same, and I have the horrors in me that it will just want to touch every part of my body now, with both front and back (why?) so he can say he has surveyed me properly before writing the prescription and giving the tincture or whatever that might be. And I am not wrong. He goes to lift the covers and my hands leap of their own accord like fierce little dog mouths to grip the blanket and keep him from uncovering me.

‘What is it?’ he asks. ‘You are cold?’ He turns to Demoiselle to explain that patients can feel very cold in the grip of fever. ’Don’t worry,’ he says to me, ‘I’ll cover you up again as soon as I can. I just need to check your other glands.’

‘Glands?’ Demoiselle says.

‘Under the arms,’ he says. ‘And boys, especially, can be badly affected in the —’ (he sidesteps whatever medical word he might have used very delicately, but I know that whatever the word might have been, it is something he won’t find when he looks for it).

‘Please!’ I squeak out, ‘It is only in my head and neck! Not my body.’

He smiles. ‘I doubt that very much, young man. Once a sickness like this has hold in one place, it has hold everywhere. It travels through the blood you see, and the blood goes everywhere.’

And then he tells me all about current thinking on the matter, that disease is spread by animalcules, tiny beasts inside us, that one cannot see with the naked eye, or even with a microscope, but only because we have not yet built the microscope that is powerful enough. Worms, he says they are called by some French physician, and these worms are in my blood and thus will have travelled all over my body. Some years ago we could not see these tiny animalcules that infest us, he says, and now we can. Not yet the ones for mumps, but the same will prove true of them, he has no doubt. Man will invent a more powerful microscope and the whole of our inner cosmos will fall open another layer, just as the heavens are submitting to our more powerful telescopes, he says.

And for a moment my fevered brain loses itself in visions of this inner and outer cosmos, mixing heaven and blood, and imagining my body full of stars and swirling galaxies.

‘So you see,’ he says, ‘that although you may feel the sickness only in one place, it will be in the whole of your body. But I think I understand you. You are no longer a child, of course, and we men must have our privacy.’ Looking over his shoulder he says, ‘Mademoiselle, would you mind leaving me alone with the boy for a moment? I will ask you back in directly, as soon as I’ve completed the examination.’

She stalls, perhaps not comprehending. I suppose she regards me as something like her property now, and she should no more be forced to leave the room while he examines me than she should when a tradesman comes to repair a scratch on the dining table. But he continues to stare at her patiently until she nods her head and vacates the room, closing the door with a precise click.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘let’s have a look.’

And still my little dog jaw hands clamp tight as they can to the blanket.

‘I tell you what,’ he says, ‘you hold it right there, and I’ll find another way that will save both our blushes.’

And with that, he starts untucking the bottom of the blanket from under the mattress.

‘No!’ I say, but only, as it turns out, in my head. From my mouth is only some strained noise as I sit up and try to clutch both ends of the blanket. The pressure in my head is so increased by my exertions that I feel immediately weakened and sick. He is winning the battle with an amused smile, his muscular doctor’s hands working the sheets and blankets free like two enormous spiders. I realise I am about to be defeated and lie back on the pillow, exhausted and tearful. I’ll be damned if he doesn’t pull up the last rooted part of the blanket up over my head!

I lie there, breathing hard. Camphor, the smell of my own sweat in the wool.

I know what he is seeing. I am seeing only my own eyelids. I would like to hold this moment still and not to move past it at all. Me and the physician stuck together in comprehension and incomprehension, and no consequences yet, not so much as even a word out of his mouth. I do not count the seconds, but it feels enough to gut a rabbit by. Then, as I can tell by the ingress of the room’s cooler air, and a light that makes my eyelids pink, he slowly pulls the blanket back to where it should be. No words, but his breathing: a controlled in and out as though barely living at all. Or perhaps that is me.

‘Open your eyes,’ he says.

I shake my head, which hurts a bit.

‘I imagine you would not want me to tell Mademoiselle de Vaucresson what I have just seen,’ he says. ‘Open your eyes.’

So I do, very slowly. His face is pale and waxy. It makes me think of cheese.

‘Explain yourself,’ he says.

But this is too large a question. It is like the whole sea has opened up in front of me, all the way to the horizon and beyond. Into my silence he drops the word ‘You’ as though out of a pipette. And then again.

‘You — are not Mrs Read’s grandson. So who are you?’

Very quietly I say,

‘Her grandson was my brother.’ And then, seeing he is not comprehending, I add, ‘My brother’s father was Mrs Read’s son. But my father was not.’

He scrutinises my face as he might survey something being passed off as antique that is nothing of the kind.

‘Then you mean half-brother,’ he says.

I do not like the half. I do not like his diminishment of us. Of our relatedness. I do not like him telling me what I mean.

‘We had different fathers,’ I say, ‘but he was my brother.’

‘So you are not Captain Read’s daughter,’ he says, as though adding things up very, very slowly.

He walks to the window and opens it. A finger of cool air threads into the room like relief. But nothing is over. My head is hot and thudding. And the doctor, I can tell, has not yet decided what to do with me.

‘If I tell Mademoiselle de Vaucresson what I know,’ he says, ‘what do you think will happen?’

I swallow. It is painful. Quietly, I acknowledge that she will throw me out on the street.

‘Yes, I should think so,’ he says. ‘Which is surely where you deserve to be. The street.’

He stares down at it as if imagining me there already, curled up in the thick whiteness of it. Because there is a heavy snowfall obliterating all its dark details, and though I cannot see down as he does I can see that inches from his nose, on the other side of the glass, snowflakes are still blowing in eager flurries to settle on the windowsill.

‘You are sick,’ he says, as if I did not know it. ‘If she throws you out today, it is likely that you will die.’

Since he is facing away from me, and his tone is very flat, I cannot tell whether this is said with relish. Whether his thinking has some of the pleasure of torture behind it. Physicians are not all healers, so I’ve heard. Some of them delight in cutting a person open.

But he is done with sharpening the tools for this operation. He closes the window, turns to me and makes his proposal. There is an oath, he says, that physicians have to take, that they will not knowingly cause harm to any person. So he cannot be the cause of my death, however indirectly, by telling Demoiselle that I have deceived her. But as soon as I recover, I must promise to leave. A week is what he regards as sufficient, and in a week he will return to the house, under the pretext of ensuring I have recovered, and if he finds I am still there, he will unmask me, and be it on my head if I have not found some other hole to scuttle into. (Or so he says, more or less). And with that he takes his leave of me.

As he opens the door inwards he almost brings Kate tumbling in on him, who must have had her ear on the keyhole, though whether she heard what he said is uncertain since he kept his words very low and not at all doctor-like. She sorries and curtsies and excuses herself by saying that Demoiselle had said to say when the doctor was done, and he says ‘Very well,’ not looking at her face for one moment but at the air in front of him, as if he were prepared to cut himself through a swathe of it. He waves at her with two of his fingers towards the corners of the bed, saying, ‘Tuck that in will you,’ not expecting anything but obedience. And Kate does as instructed but half looking back at him, very impressed with his disdain for her, and I realise only then he is rather handsome and young, and she is probably impressed by his not noticing her, having had far too much noticing from other quarters. She tucks me in deftly, done almost before she’s begun, and then she’s running after him, no doubt to do her other duty of telling Demoiselle that the doctor has finished, and the door closes behind her, and the room falls quiet.

What comes to me only as silence must be some words between himself and Demoiselle in the room two floors below me, and then there is Mister Thomas’s patient voice in the hall, handing the doctor his coat no doubt, and the door opening and closing. My head thumps dully as if still under the blanket. No one brings a tincture or a balm or a compress. Nothing collapses in on me, and nobody comes to berate me. The house settles into its comfortable winter haunches like an old barn used to being out in all weathers. But I am discovered.

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Only a Jingle-brains Would Join the Army

Jim is more than a friend. He is my eyes on the world beyond howdoyoudo-ing and silver service. Being so much immersed in the market, he also has a fine grasp of the common language, which is not the language I ever found in Captain Read’s books or in Mister Rotard’s mouth. In Jim’s tongue, bawds are buttock-brokers, any broadsheet ballad he doesn’t like is bumfodder, a drunk man is in his altitudes, a mistress is someone’s peculiar and anyone he thinks an idiot is jingle-brains. Jim’s way of speaking helps him pass through the streets and taverns unmolested and will prove useful to me should I ever need to enter any area where round vowels will have a person beaten. The only place where Jim’s words do him no good at all is at home where his uncle, so often in his altitudes, will once or twice a week give him a lacing, give him a lamb pie, and other descriptions that sound less painful than the truth.

Since the war at home cannot be won, Jim rests his hopes of victory on the war for the Spanish throne, keeping me apprised with news of it, and sometimes a rumour or two about Willy and George, although we can only go by what we hear of their regiment, broadsheet news that is gossiped about the place, since neither Willy nor George so much as went to petty school, and neither of them are capable of putting their thoughts in a letter.

The year blows by very slow, with the French pushing forward and the Grand Alliance pushing back, and the French pushing forward again, and nothing much to measure anyone’s success except how many bodies have fallen on either side, one of them being Willy, who got a musket ball in the leg and had it lopped off and then got gangrene or somesuch, according the chap who saw his mother crying in the market. Jim says just as well as he was a terrible jingle-brains anyway, because after all what good is a red coat and two pounds or even twenty when you’ll never see another summer or put your hand up a petticoat, but I know he’s cut up about it all the same. By the end of the year it looks like Vienna will fall and the whole game will be up, but winter sweeps both sides into their quarters and Londoners off the gossiping streets to their various hearths.

But when the Spring campaign begins, we hear the Duke of Marlborough is marching his whole army south, thirty thousand souls in one long red caterpillar. Nobody knows where he is going, though everyone has their guess, and in June, Jim lays actual money on it being the Danube (not with me, but with the barkeep at the Green Dragon), and by August is crowing how right he is. And then, on one of those cool and blowy days that doesn’t feel like it’s come in the right season, but is more of an English summer day than any of us like to tell ourselves, we hear about the victory at Blenheim. Jim steals a broadsheet someone has put down and when I find him after supper makes me read every inch of the reports there, but none of them are enough to sate his appetite, and so he has us go down to Cragg’s Court near Charing Cross where there is a big book of maps in the window open to the page on Bavaria, and he points through the glass at spots I can’t train my eyes to. After telling me what he knows about the victory at Blenheim, he says,

‘I’ve a mind to join up and pulverise those Frenchies.’

‘Jim,’ I say, and am careful about saying it, ‘weren’t you the one who’s been saying all along you’d have to be a jingle-brains to join the army? After what happened to Willy and all—’ and he turns fierce on me,

‘Because of what happened to Willy, see? Because of what they done to Willy.’

And I say to Jim, ‘Those that put a musket ball in his leg were common folk like you and me, following orders, and it doesn’t make the world any better to put a musket ball in one of theirs.’

And he says, ‘All the same, all the same,’ and I can see him jingling his own brains into something like a marching tune even as he goes quiet on me, and as we walk away from Cragg’s Court he says,

‘What’s here for me anyway? Never two pennies to rub together unless I thieve, and what’s at the end of that but the noose? But if I fight for my country there’s two pounds straight in your purse, and honour, and regular pay.’

‘Poor pay,’ I say. ‘Poor food. A poor bed under the poor stars.’

And he nods, but I can see all over his face the trickles of thought, wondering if it might be better to put himself in the sights of a French musket than at the end of the meat-hammers of his uncle.

‘They have matchlocks,’ he says, ‘against our flintlocks. Do they not?’

‘Yes, Jim,’ I say.

‘And everyone’s saying our side is better trained and drilled and fed, and so we’ll be killing them mostly and not the other way round.’

‘Jim,’ I say, ‘what are we killing them for? So that the throne of Spain goes to a nobleman from Austria and not a nobleman from France? How many poor men die so that one wealthy man is favoured over another wealthy man, in a country that has nothing to do with us?’

‘If the Frenchies get control of Spain they will end up with all of Europe,’ he says. ‘They’ll end up with England. We’ll be Frenchies.’

‘Even if that’s true,’ I say, ‘what would it matter? Wasn’t our King a Dutchman until two years ago, and did that put any more or less pennies in your pocket, or meat in your porringer? What does it matter to us what the wealthy want, and what does it profit us to serve them?’

And he looks at me very fierce.

‘What’s us?’ he says. ‘What do you mean by us? There’s no us. You serve the wealthy. I sell oranges. You have linen shirts and a nice blue jacket. You’re practically one of them. You can read and write. All I can do is shoulder a musket. You can join up and stay away from the lines, keeping the books, writing down casualties. You got choices. I only have two. I can stay here and get served lamb pie. Or I can fight for my country.’

And for all the words I recently learned, there’s none left in me for Jim.

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The Demolition of Pity is Fruitless

A year on from that bolted door, I think of our mother much as I think of the cottage in Broxholme: somewhere cold and hard on the bones. Not somewhere to return to. The attic room in Albemarle Street is more of a home to me. Jim more of a family. A whole year of full moons spilling their light across the slope of my ceiling has made me an old campaigner. Having secured some sponges as my mother suggested, I have kept my bleeding a secret. Just as some soldiers have wounds that never heal, I have mine, which opens as regular as the moon opens its face to the sky, and tears a hole in me, and lets me know I am a soldier in my own manner. And I will call it a wound, too, should it ever betray me. I have thought of a story for it, a terrible fall onto a piece of agricultural ironwork, the kind of accident no man or boy would like to think too much upon, to make them move swiftly past the question of it.

They say that women are by nature damp, and men by nature fiery, and that though a man’s fire is a constant gift that can be put to good use whether in parliament or battlefield, a woman’s dampness must be released from her in the form of blood, lest it drown her (and she drown the world) with her tears. I had feared bleeding would make me more womanly, but it has steeled me to be more courageous.

Are women truly the weaker sex? I do not know any man who would march themselves through days of bleeding and belly ache without complaint as I have done. Nor bear the pain as other women do of passing a baby’s skull, which is the size of a gourd, through a part of their body no larger than their bum-hole. If men did such a thing they would award each other medals for doing so, but women are told it is natural and no particular miracle, and that men are far stronger than they could ever be, when the only manner in which that is true is because of the muscles that Nature has bestowed on them. I would like to see a man nurse a baby out of his own bodily fluids with hard little teeth champing down on his delicacies, or carry lullaby-cheats on front and back and one in each hand as he goes about his business. What is the strength freely gifted to men by Nature when compared to the strength of inner endurance that every woman must develop to the endless chipping and crushing that men impose upon her for the sheer fact of her having nothing like a sausage on her body?

Oh, women must bear patiently what men would yowl at, and swallow in silence what any man would think it well within his rights to vomit back on the world: the hammers aimed at our thoughts, our cleverness, and any small ambition we ever had to be considered useful for more than being their servants in bedroom and scullery. Regrettably I must include even Jim in this, not only for his between-legs equipment, but because I have heard him speak about passing women as though they are fruit or vegetables on stalls, to be appraised and measured and perhaps squeezed. When once I said that there was probably some woman who had written a poem in response to the late Mister Dryden’s lines about a woman’s counsel that was far truer and perhaps quite rude, Jim laughed and replied that a woman who could write was an abomination and he would wager no poem a woman wrote would be called a poem by any man who could understand it. He might be right in that, only for the wrong reasons. Which is to say any man who could understand a woman’s poem written in response to Mister Dryden’s lines would be obliged to condemn it, for the fact it would condemn his sex, just as I condemn Mister Dryden’s ‘The Cock and the Fox’ for condemning mine. Jim cannot help that he is raised in this soup of men who all say the same things, and the whole country is one big vat of the same opinion on women, even among the women. Nevertheless, it strikes me that in hiding my monthly pain I am exactly as stoical as women always are, to men’s advantage. Every bit as brave as a man is meant to be.

For years I thought myself no different from a boy. I saw no reason why a person should be thought weaker or more foolish than another on the basis of what hangs, or doesn’t hang, between their legs. But I didn’t know then about the tides that grown women are prey to: pulled damply towards the moon just like the sea is, with such awful tenderness and predictability. What if the balance of humours in my body, which up until now has tiptoed childishly along the border between boy and girl, bundles me up and drives me forcefully where I do not want to go, into the country of women, like a highwayman might commandeer a stolen carriage? With my humours tipped, how easily might I fall prey to womanly thoughts? What if, no matter how much I hide my curves in clothing, or contain my blood, my thoughts themselves curve and warp and bleed out female enough to betray me? My aim is to resist this at all costs. To think as a man thinks, and to catch in myself any softness that comes upon me and stamp on it as fiercely as I would stamp on a cockroach.

My fears are not unfounded. When the moon waxes, I find myself softening to the world as butter on a spring windowsill. Last month, returning from seeing Jim for a smoke and a talk about the dangerous machinations of the French (whose plans are the talk of all the barrow boys of London), I caught myself melting at the sight of a hand-sized kitten mewling at the window of a house. An icy downpour had soaked me into a sense of communion with this kitten, shut out and spiky with rain. The womanly part of me took over my heart for some moments, hurting for the tiny creature. But in order not to end up hopelessly blasted like that kitten, I must reject the tender indulgences of women. So I swore at the dumb creature for letting itself be locked out, despite every ounce of its prettiness.

For prettiness, I already know, is worthless. Prettiness is all that women are praised for, and is more often their downfall than any other characteristic except that of believing the lies that men are prone to tell them. Prettiness is what pulls men towards them like so many idiot moths, to have their purses burnt providing yet more props to it: the lace, silk and feather adornments, the perfume and jewels. Women are the idiot candles, unaware of how easily the flame of prettiness will be snuffed when they surrender to a man’s ardour and get fat with his children. If they do not die in the begetting of them, their prettiness is ruined through the care of them, through the worn-down daily tasks of being mother and wife, of running a household, of being wider and older than the girl he courted. If prettiness survives motherhood, age will cut it down anyway, blade after blade, until the whole waving harvest of beauty is barren, nothing left but pitiful gleanings and stubble fit for burning.

While an ageing woman will be deemed a hag or a crone, an ageing man is thought handsome even after his hair greys and his eyes crease, and no matter how many wives he has killed in the bearing of his children, he may marry another one young enough to be his daughter, and destroy her too, and no one will think the worse of him for doing so. Women’s prettiness will last little more than the useful span of a good hackney horse, while men’s handsomeness, believed to exist in parity with oak trees, is in any case never thought as important as the fatness of their pocketbook or the pureness of their lineage or the usefulness of their trade. Thus I eschew prettiness. I am grateful that no one sees it in me.

Kate, whether hanging laundry, or beating a rug, is undoubtedly pretty. She hawks her prettiness by walking with one foot slightly crossing the other, drawing attention to her hips and behind, the place where a baby will sit when that space is rented out to one. Whether she knows her prettiness will be gone before the crabapple pip she planted in the garden becomes a tree bearing fruit, I cannot tell. Demoiselle, too, behaves as though her looks will be hers until the end of days. She plays suitors against each other, holding them all at arms’ length, provoking each one (for they are all aware of each other) to raise stakes like gamblers at a table. Yet the pot at the end of her rainbow, which each suitor claims would bring them the deepest joy, is a leprechaun’s trick, which will vanish almost as soon as they empty themselves into it.

I school myself fiercely in the art of pitiless thinking. Close to Demoiselle’s house the pavements are clear of beggars but around Covent Garden there are unfortunates of all kinds. Many are men come home from the old wars without bits of themselves, who hobbled their way into London hoping those powdered-wig and sprung-carriage buffoons might cast off sufficient scraps to keep an old soldier alive, not knowing there is a whole army of blasted apart infantry already pitched there, hawking their war wounds for pennies and beer. Any womanly feeling I might have for them is easily scratched out by my knowing they have widowed wives and orphaned children in their former employment.

The women on the streets are harder. They have not killed. Are not old soldiers except if they have fled from the battlefields of marriage. I tell myself they are not my concern. My only concern, if I am to survive without any family to care for me, is myself. But the children? The children are worse than kittens. They stare out of their skulls as though they cannot believe the world would make and unmake them so readily. Women crouch down to pet them, and to press a fat penny into their hands, and crunch the child’s fingers around it. I tell myself they are better out of this world. I work to make them as ordinary and unfelt as a front door step or a kerbstone.

There are other reasons to harden oneself. A new war has begun. Our land heats up again with ferocious talk about foreigners. It is said that Louis of France wants to take over all of Europe. Now that his grandson is the Spanish king, some say if we do not take measures, we will all be speaking French by Christmas, and eating nothing but onions. I don’t believe the half of it, since it seems there is always a good reason for wealthy people to throw poor people into muddy fields to butcher each other. The last war has only been done for as long as it took me to grow out of a pair of boots, and now we have a new one, declared by a queen so new herself she must scarcely know her way around her palaces.

The market boys talk about it with great excitement. Two of them, Willy and George, are old enough to take the king’s shilling — or I suppose it is the queen’s shilling now — except it is not a shilling but ‘two whole pounds!’ Willy says this with eyes as wide as a whore’s cunning. He adds,

‘I could almost buy myself a farm for that!’

And Jim says,

‘Only if you’re not planted first, for there are whole fields in Holland waiting to be fertilised with soldier boys.’

But Willy’s not to be knocked off his pretend horse (so sure he is that he will be accepted for the cavalry for the fact he has ridden a donkey) and George says even if the end of the war has them buried in Paris itself it will be a far better adventure than standing out in all weathers getting folk to buy vegetables from them before they get spotted and rotted.

‘One thing about oranges, says Jim, is they are hardy as fleas — for everyone knows a flea cannot be crushed no matter how hard you squeeze it — they can be thrown and rolled without a bruise, and a three month orange looks very much like a three day orange, except for a little thinning of the rind, which you will never see until it’s bought and peeled.’

‘And I will get myself a red coat,’ says George, ‘and be proud to wear it.’

‘And get yourself some new farting-crackers while you’re at it,’ says Jim, because George’s breeches are none of the best.

‘Oh yes, the red coat!’ says Willy.

‘Hides the blood lovely,’ says Jim.

Yes, day after day, the talk around the barrows and stalls is all of the Grand Alliance, which makes a great difference, they say, from being only a soldier in the English Army. To be a soldier in the Grand Alliance is to fight with your comrades in other countries, and make peace in Europe by driving the French back to their own country.

Jim and I hold the same view, which is that there is no profit to be had in living through a war, and even less profit to be had in dying for it, but among Jim’s friends there is hatred of the French that goes back through fathers and grandfathers, consisting in all kinds of small and large grievances, from being orphaned by a Frenchman to believing that Frenchman compromise the virtue of English ladies, to not approving of their food. I decide I will not feel pity for any of those who run to war to kill the French, even if that is Willy and George, and nor will I feel pity for those Frenchmen who have similarly decided to gamble their lives in the field. And the less pity I feel, the more I understand the tug that Willy and George feel to go marching and murdering for money. They have no thought of being murdered themselves. They only want license to rampage through a crowd of strangers, hacking them to pieces.

By St Nicholas Day, Willy and George have joined up and gone to train in winter quarters. The market is not quieter for them, as there is always another boy to come and pipe his lungs behind a barrow, though where those boys come from I don’t know. From between a woman’s legs of course, but between then and the time they arrive with their barrows one could only give a part of the city as an answer. They rise and burst into market song like bubbles in a soup that’s coming to the boil. Birds are the same come spring time, arriving and calling side by side with no thought to the racket they are making.

I see Ma near the year’s end. She has the look of a wax candle that has its wick burned too short and cannot be lit again. I only see her from across the street, and I don’t believe she sees me, or if she does, she pretends not to. She has another purple-yellow print on her cheek. Crocus colours, I think, like Mrs Read’s cushions, but turned inside out, purple at the centre and yellow at the edge. She is swollen, too, and I imagine there will be another foundling on somebody’s doorstep before too long.

But I am wrong.

Our mother took a paddle to my legs many times, and the flat of her hand more, and a fist once or twice, and in all those times I never saw how she would meet her own end. I was not inclined to see it. The moment the fury came upon her I would avoid her gaze, which as you know, was so much like being stabbed that it could almost kill you on its own. I thought I might sense if she were dead, though I never loved her as I loved you, brother. But it seems she could be chopped into pieces, rinsed in a colander and fried in a good batter and wouldn’t have the smallest sensation of it. Because it is a surprise to me when I come to find Jim one early evening in February as he is packing up in the closing dark, and he tells me the bent-nosed crone from the brothel has been by, and recognising him, apprised him that my mother has been buried for more than a week, and another baby too, though they’d had to wait for the ground to unfreeze to admit them. He feeds this news to me with great care, as though handing me a thing that might break, but the words just whistle through me like air through an open door. I am not sorry to think of how our mother ended, or even the baby who in all innocence killed the both of them, because it seems to me that both are better out of it.

And as I lie awake in the attic of this creaking house it seems to me the same is true of all of us, and that I should not be so concerned about death as I have been until now, because it will come when it wishes, like it or no, and will flatten out our fortunes at a swoop, making each of us the same: just a body in the soil.

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You Need Not Be a Child to the Parent

‘A mouse!’ says Jim, holding his side from a laughing stitch. ‘A bloody mouse!’

‘In truth,’ I say, ‘it wasn’t a mouse that startled me. I startled myself. I didn’t intend to set alight to anything. I was the most shocked of them all.’

‘Then you are the mouse,’ he says, triumphant. ‘Startling yourself. Come, Mouse! Buy me an ale.’

Night is falling and his oranges have been locked away. I have a gentleman’s message in my pocket that I will say I was made to wait for. I am gladder to see Jim Coker than ever. He has a split lip from what he calls ‘a gentleman’s disagreement’ which I gather once we are sat in the tap room with our ales was just a regular beating from his Uncle that he dressed up in words in order to feel more courageous about it.

‘Better to say I was defending my honour with some stranger,’ he says, ‘than that I was smashed up by my only family. When your own blood think you a sorry wretch worth smacking why should anyone else think otherwise?’

I think of how my mother’s palm used to sting: not only the roughness of it but the fact she would hit me at all.

‘Why do you not stand up to him?’ I ask. ‘You are almost his size now.’

‘It’s his roof,’ says Jim. ‘I figure I can take lumps under his roof or take worse in the street. The street is no place to sleep, aside from the cold. There’s people will rob your eyeballs from under your eyelids, I heard.’

‘That’s not true!’ I say, though his words force me to see such a robbing as vividly as though I had witnessed it.

‘It’s only an expression,’ he laughs. ‘Soon, I will have enough money to rent my own rooms. I have some things of value in my possession, and I am collecting more of them, and so long as my Uncle doesn’t find them they will buy me my escape before too long.’

‘Where do you collect them from?’ I ask.

‘Places,’ he says, looking down at his ale. And then brightly, ‘Not places you should go, Mouse.’

‘I’m no Mouse!’ I say. ‘I’m taller than you are.’

‘That’s why it’s funnier,’ he says. ‘I can’t very well call you Burnt Bed, can I? If I call you Mouse we shall always remember your secret. Which makes us firmer friends. You don’t object to that, do you?’

‘No,’ I say, and use that pledge of friendship to proceed to my business, saying that as we are firm friends, there is something I must ask of him. I unfold to him my plan that he might look out for my mother and, if he sees her, ask Gordon or George to watch his oranges and follow her so as to find out where she is living. The complication is that he saw her only briefly, and though he noted her gaudy dress, that is something that might be changed. He says he isn’t confident he would recognise her again, and I am at a loss to describe her apart from her being slender boned and pale skinned with brown hair.

‘No identifying marks?’ he asks, doing an impression of Mister Rathbone, the market’s infamous beadle.

I can think of none. The problem being that she is pretty enough to ply her trade in private rooms, which kind of prettiness is all about the absence of difference, perfectly even eyes and lips and skin tones, and just the right measure of prettiness not to stand out at all. Not a mole nor a scar to define her, nor in the other direction, exceptional eyes or other body parts. When I have failed to describe her in any manner that might allow Jim to identify her by sight, he has another idea. A lady-friend of his Uncle’s works in the same trade, in the part of town they call the Birdcage, and he thinks she might be able to locate my mother if furnished with a name.

‘They all have made-up names,’ he says. ‘Buttercup and Kitten and the like. But they use real names with each other. She might know your Ma.’

So I tell him our mother’s name, and he tells me I must get something for his Uncle’s lady-friend in return.

‘What would she like?’ I ask, hoping he won’t say anything that will force me to dig too deeply into my secreted crowns. They are my first line of defence should I find myself cast out.

‘Mathematics,’ he says, and for a moment I think I have tuned out for more than a few seconds, perhaps several minutes, and missed a whole by-water of the conversation that has led to this unlikely word.

‘I should give her Mathematics?’ I ask, fully expecting to be corrected and clipped round the ear for falling asleep.

‘Some Mathematical puzzles,’ he says. ‘It is her great peculiarity. She can calculate in her head with extreme rapidity and likes nothing better than to show off this skill to men who have come to her for her other talents. My Uncle has not yet given her a sum she could not do, but that is unsurprising since he stayed at petty school only three years and knows only enough mathematics to be sure when an orange is priced to make a profit.’

‘Where will I get Mathematical puzzles?’ I ask.

‘Why from your former tutor, that bespectacled beanpole who licks Latin out of the air. He gave you mathematics as well, did he not?’

‘He tried,’ I say, ‘but I am not very accomplished.’

‘Ask him for equations,’ Jim says. ‘I hear equations are delightful to her.’

‘You mean sums,’ I say?

‘Oh no, bigger than sums. Something equations. Quadrangle equations. Or was it Adriatic equations. From Greece, I think.’

I have no idea what equations he means, but imagine something to savour, like a ripe fig.

‘I will ask Mister Rotard,’ I say, and I do, the next morning, through the kindness of Mrs Fredericks, who knows where he lodges. The equations cost me one of my precious crowns because, as he put it when I surprised him in his pyjamas, his knowledge cost him dear and he should not be expected to part with it for nothing. In the afternoon I deliver into Jim’s hand a piece of paper covered with letters and numbers that make no sense to either of us. It is a peculiar thing to be swapping for my mother’s address. After that, I have nothing to do but wait. And in all the in between time, I must manage not to bleed on my new mattress (about which Demoiselle de Vaucresson was very cross in the Frenchest way you can imagine) or my clothes or indeed the floor, chairs, or any other place.

Since I do not feel I can take more of Kate’s clouts and dispose of them, for two days I am reduced to stealing rags from washing lines. There is often a message to be delivered at the end of the day, whether to someone that was seen earlier, to thank them, or someone who will be seen tomorrow, to confirm arrangements, and I make short diversions to neighbourhoods where I will not be recognised, in the part of my errand where it is just getting dark, so that I might be more hidden in the half-light, and only steal from women careless enough not to notice that night has fallen. The act of stealing makes my heart thud, but that sensation is not unpleasant.

By the end of the week, as I am running through the market with a message in my pocket, Jim whistles me over, and when he has finished serving he says his Uncle Ted’s lady friend has given him an address, and folds it into my hand. We arrange to go there together during my evening message run. In the thin hour between the end of the market and the start of supper, we lock up his barrow of oranges before leaving. The cold sky is already darkening, and stars are winking at us like sprites come to see us make mischief. Jim is excited about visiting a house of ill repute, but I am wary.

The house whose address is on the piece of paper is as shabby as the handwriting that spells it, and I am surprised at the outer state of it, which seems far worse than our old cottage in Broxholme. But when we are let in by an older, bent-nosed woman who assumes us customers, it is transformed. The walls are draped with coloured cloth, even in the hallway, perhaps to cover the mould and damp that I can smell despite the heavy scent of incense. The incense is especially strange to me because the only place I have smelt incense is in church. This is a strange kind of church, I suppose, where some men come to worship or be worshipped.

I am so bemused by the colourful walls, the churchy smell, and the very obvious wig of the woman I am following, that I am taken aback when a man and woman lurch out of a side-room like a pillar collapsing, he half-undressed, she giggling, smacking against the wall just in front of my nose. They would have pancaked me had I been an inch or two further along. The woman (a bright and broad smile on her like the kind of apples grocers put in their windows, all polished up, and nothing like the wormy things they try to sell you) untangles herself from him, and leads him like a puppy into another room further along.

‘Pay no heed,’ says the bent-nosed woman, turning only briefly over her shoulder, ‘come this way,’ and we go deeper into the house, which goes back much further than I thought.

‘We’re not customers,’ I say, running it quickly out of me like water from a pricked bladder, ‘I’m here to talk to my mother.’ The woman stops sharply, turns round like I’ve prodded her behind.

‘Who’s your mother?’ she asks.

‘Margret Read,’ says I.

And she sighs and starts shoofing me out with her hands, shoofing like we might the dim sort of animals that go where you herd them, sheep or milk cows. Yet her flapping hands command, shoof, shoof, shoof, and I find myself walking backwards, and since I don’t bump into him, Jim too.

‘I must speak to her!’ I protest, walking backwards all the time, and she carries on flapping her hands.

When finally she has backed us both onto the step she says,

‘There is no talk of mothers in this house. We are not mothers and we don’t have children here. And Margret is busy at this present time.’

I note her words have become very stiff and precise, as though accidentally over-starched.

‘However,’ she continues, ‘should you choose to wait round the back, near the two privies there, I will send her out to speak to you when she is done.’

I look to Jim, who is beaming with curiosity.

‘Round the back,’ she says, closing the door.

‘Come on then,’ says Jim, taking my arm, ‘let’s go round the back,’ but I halt like a horse that’s spooked.

‘Not you,’ I say. ‘There’ll be no privacy there. I don’t want you hearing —’

‘No privacy at the privies?’ he smiles, but he drops my arm and says, ‘Of course, you must go alone. I’ll wait here, shall I? You haven’t got a few shillings on you, have you?’

‘No,’ I say, though I do. I don’t want him spending them there. So I leave him on the step, and there he is some time later when I return to him, chewing on a piece of liquorice that came from goodness knows where.

In the between time, waiting by a necessary house for my mother seems more fitting the longer I do it, and by the time I hear footsteps I am considering it the very best place for meeting a parent who has so often caused me discomfort, thoughts of whom I have so often wished to bury. Yet when I see her I have an immediate hope that she will be glad of it That her face will light differently on mine than the last time we spoke. That she will have come belatedly to those feelings for their children that mothers are traditionally believed to feel.

‘Oh,’ she says, as she comes around the back of the privy and finds me there, ‘it’s you.’

There is enough light from the newly risen moon to bathe both our faces in their disappointment.

‘Do you have another grown child that would call you mother?’ I ask.

And I see then she held out some strange hope of it being you.

‘I did not expect you,’ she says. ‘That you would’ — she hesitates and turns her face away and back again — ‘that you would call.’

‘You thought it more likely that my missing brother would find you than that I would travel a mile across London to do so?’

She looks shamefaced.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘it is not the past that I am here to dredge. It is the present that needs dealing with. If you do not wish me to be thrown out of my position, you will need to advise me.’

I surprise myself with the tone of my voice: the grown up and business-like manner of speaking I suddenly have with her, as though I am the mother and she the child. I do not know whether it is my being treated for two years as a gentleman, and the schooling of Mister Rotard, or whether it is due to my being a liveried Footboy and she being a whore. Perhaps it is simply my contempt for her, which has grown as my body has grown. Imagining this meeting I had thought I would shrink in her presence and become the child she so easily beat and cowed. But now I find I have better words than she does, and great strength in the wrongs she has done me, that hold me calm and metalled in front of her, my whole face a kind of armour, as I explain what I need to know: how to manage my monthly bleeding without discovery.

She is the right person to ask, not only because she is invested in being rid of me, but because women of her profession have developed many useful deceits, especially when it comes to womanly bleeding, which is deemed so poisonous to male flesh that men would not be customers for one week a month if they knew of it. She is clearly grateful that it is this rather than any other thing that I am asking her. Perhaps she dreaded I would ask her to be my mother again, give me shelter, provide for me in some way. Her gratitude spills out in several bundles of practically delivered information. Clouts, she says, being bulky and troublesome, are sometimes discarded for another arrangement: sponges, which can be cut into the sizes of small fists and stuffed where necessary.

I do not immediately understand what is to be done with these pieces of sponge until she mimes what she means in so unfortunate a movement that I hope no grown child ever has to see their mother do such a thing in the rest of history. She has, in her new profession, forgotten any degree of decorum she once pretended to adopt, and she does not even register the horror on my face as she continues, telling me that it is easy enough to rinse them out, and dry them, and far less conspicuous than a line of clouts.

All the time she is not quite looking me in the eye, and is from time to time tugging down the ends of her sleeves to cover wrists that look discoloured, blotchy and dark.

When I have asked all I know how to ask and our conversation is concluded, she requests that I do not seek her out again. And though I hardly needed her reason, she feels compelled to supply one.

‘It is painful to me,’ she says.

‘On what basis?’

‘To be so estranged from you. To not know you.’

‘If that were true,’ I say, ‘then you would surely wish to see more of me, so that you might come to know me.’

She looks to the end of the alley, and back again, and then up to the sky and down to the ground, so that it’s clear she’s doing anything other than put her eyes on me.

‘You look like him,’ she says. ‘Your brother.’

For a moment, she stares into me as though I were a hole in the ground. As she turns to go I catch sight of her cheek: a pale bruise under the eye. I stand in the alleyway until her steps have reached the back door and bolted it shut.

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The Secret of Bleeding is to Bleed in Secret

Wrongness wakes me. Wetness. Sleepily, I send a hand down to touch it, bring it out, like catching a fish. Black in the dawn light, but I already sense what colour it means to be. Wide awake now, I keep my bloodied hand held high, struggle out of the blanket onto my feet and pull bedclothes away to reveal a wide map of red.

Am I murdered? Stabbed by some assassin and not yet sensible to the pain? Has Cook, finally, lost all reason and patience with me? Moved from spoon to knife? She has two good knives would do this, fillet me out of my skin.

On the sheet is written the whole country of me. How I began and how I end. Mercy yes, so much blood in my bed I must surely be on my way out of this world. With my unbloodied hand, I feel my belly for an injury. No break in the skin. Did the bucket hit me so hard that something inside has been severed? That would count as foolish as the King of England dying from a molehill. Must I die of a bad catch?

But you’re already wise, are you not? You know how common it is for a person to bleed who has been cursed with a certain kind of innards. Cursed is the word that now comes to calm me: cursed I am, indeed, for this mess is the curse of Eve. Which thought sits me down, less horrified, on the edge of that ruined mattress, to contemplate what to do.

The curse of Eve, as I have understood it on my short time on this earth, is a great nuisance to all women, but especially so to those women who choose to live outside their sex, as I do. Nevertheless I will not have the course of my life undone by some ancient minikin’s urge to eat fruit. The problem of the bloodied bed must be solved, and I must solve it with nothing but my own ingenuity. A mole may end the life of a king, but I shan’t have mine overturned by a bloody sheet. I strip it off and see the problem goes deeper: blood has soaked into the mattress, staining the ticking and soaking inside to the straw, which will go mouldy and rancid if washed or mopped, unless I can find some manner of drying it. Those parts that would betray the secret of my sex are as much on the inside as the outside. I will not be saved by cold water and salt. I put the sheet back as it was, peel off my stained nightshirt, mop the floor with it (for I have dripped there too), and place it over the red map on the sheet, with all the bloodied part of it hidden beneath. Then I fold the unbloodied blanket over sheet and shirt, and say a small prayer that it is not laundry day and Kate will not be up to strip my bedclothes in an hour.

I sponge off my body, pinking the water in the washbowl. Pour the contents very carefully out of the window onto the sloping shingles of the roof, already slick with drizzle. Then dress and go downstairs. My first task is to liberate some clouts from the linen cupboard without being seen. Back in my room, I tuck one into my breeches which are tight enough, I think, to hold it in place. I am asked to run a message to Picadilly, and though it is out of my way, I beat a path to Jim Coker, who knows far more about the world than I do.

Am I undone? Will I be cast out on the streets? It is like opening a box of snakes to let myself think such things. I am half down the street before I must stop because I cannot breathe for sobbing. Worse, the running has shifted the clout I stuffed between my legs and I will have blood down my breeches if I cannot adjust it. I take myself off down an alley and walk until I can breathe and at least half think. When there is no-one one about, I put my hands into my breeches enough to position the clout where it needs to be. I will bandage it to me in the future, but for now I must walk with my thighs somewhat pressed together.

I know this bleeding has something to do with having babies. I dread swelling up like my mother, because there would be no hope of staying a boy then. But then I recall how I was got upon my mother with a clonk to the head in the stairwell, and that it always takes a man to put a baby in a woman, and I have never been close enough to a man to be clonked (excepting the sort who wouldn’t clonk me: you, Mister Lampard, Mister Rotard, Adisa, and Mister Thomas). Nor have I done the twining thing that prostitutes do around men in doorways, which I sometimes walk past at a pace, which must be the start of it or a part of it. Since I have known neither clonking nor twining I must be safe from growing a baby in my belly, at least for now. But I am not safe from being found out. I breathe quieter and quieter, and shut all feeling away again, until I have a notion what I might say to Jim.

Jim is learning a new trick to do with dislocating his shoulders. Or looking that way, anyway, so he can slide himself through small spaces, he says, and when I ask him what small spaces he laughs, ‘a lady’s cunning place,’ and then pokes me on my arm, as if I am supposed to laugh too. I say to him it just so happens I have a question about a lady’s cunning place and does he know about the bleeding of them. He asks why with a twist on his eyebrow, and I say no reason. You mustn’t go near a lady’s cunning place when it’s bleeding, he says, because the blood is poisonous, and can shrivel you where you would not want to be shrivelled, and burn like caustic, and he has heard it can blunt a knife blade too, and kill vegetables where they grow, and make the ground barren for seven years, and why, do I have a sweetheart now? And I say no, Jim, I am only asking because I heard about it. Is it often? As often as the moon is full, he says, but only when the woman is not with child, or suckling one, so not so often once they are married.

‘As often as the moon is full?’ I ask. ‘And at the same time?’ (The moon will be full tonight).

‘Why do you ask?’ he says, and then, ‘There is a sweetheart —’

‘No,’ I say, ‘no. Only — if there were a sweetheart —’

‘Ha!’ he says and spins all the way round on his heel, and whistles at the same time, and lands back in my face. ‘I knew it. Who is she?’

‘Nobody you know,’ I say. ‘Actually, less of a sweetheart and more of a — cousin.’

‘A cousin?’ He is suddenly larger in all directions, like a bird that fluffs its feathers up.

‘Yes, a cousin. And I let her stay with me —’

‘Am I to meet this cousin?’ He jerks his big head in several directions, as if looking out for a worm.

‘Listen —’ I say, but we are interrupted by a customer. Jim serves her with charm and complete attention, but the moment she has the oranges in her basket, he is right back on the scent.

‘Can I meet this cousin? Where is she?’

‘Gone back to my aunt,’ I say, and he deflates immediately, though his smile is still there like a smear of jam on his lips. I ask him, ‘And you are gone to Lady-heaven, are you?’

‘Coming back now,’ he says.

‘This cousin,’ I say, ‘I let her stay in my bed.’ He perks up and I add quickly, ‘Because there was nowhere else she could sleep. But Jim —’

‘No!’ he says having reached the end of my thought.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘There is blood in my bed.’

‘How much blood?’

‘A lot of blood.’

‘Tell Kate. Kate will clean it. She’s a good girl. She’ll know what to do.’

‘I can’t tell Kate. I can’t tell anyone. I secreted the girl into my room, and it will not be looked on kindly.’

‘Hmmm.’ He curls his shoulders and looks at the ground until it gives him an idea. Then he takes two oranges off the stall and puts them in my hands. ‘Stay here,’ he says, ‘juggle these.’

But I cannot juggle, so I just stand with two oranges in my hands while he goes off and talks to his friend George. After a while, coming back with a hop and skip,

‘Make water on it,’ he says.

‘You mean —’

‘Piss on it,’ he says. ‘That’s George’s suggestion.’

‘Does that remove blood?’

He laughs, ‘Who knows! It will dilute it at the least and at the most there’ll be something for Kate to clean that you can more easily explain.’

I say, ‘Is that the best you can do, Jim Coker?’

He says, ‘Tell them the truth and take the beating. It cannot be as bad as lying in a girl’s blood or your own piss.’

I deliver the message (some order of provisions) to Piccadilly, and run back as fast as I can. Which is not so fast. Physical exertion makes the cramping in my belly far greater, so I cannot keep a pace, and twice I have to find somewhere to stop and reposition the clout. I return to Demoiselle de Vaucresson’s house feeling utterly defeated by my body, which must make liquid at all costs, it seems, including smartly wiped away tears when Cook shouts at me for taking longer than I ought. All afternoon I do what is required of me by Mister Thomas, despite the dragging and clawing of some kind of demon inside me. All the while I am thinking what to do, but every path I think along ends badly. Part of me is so tired, so ready to lie down, that I would confess my sex if only that wouldn’t mean I would have no bed to lie upon. Through supper I use every ounce of myself to hold to a polite and interested face despite my sense of doom and the clawing in my belly. Long after the other staff have gone to bed, I stay in the scullery, busying my hands in some voluntary polishing in preparation for the return of the mistress in the morning and hoping the answer will arrive. The dragging ache doesn’t leave me any more than the memory of what is waiting for me when I get back to my room.

Sure enough, when I pull back the blanket, there it is - the now crusted brown nightshirt and the blood mapped out in its own horrible continent. Standing on one foot and then the other, I pull off my stockings, keeping an eye on it, but it doesn’t move. I stand there barefoot in the sad light of my own candle, staring. Lift the nightgown and take the candle closer to it to inspect how the blood has dried in — how cracked the gathering at the neck, and how impossible it will surely be to remove now. Then I don’t know what possesses me, besides something like divine guidance. Lifting the nightshirt up to my eye with one hand, I drift it into the candle in the other, and it starts to catch. To burn. The flames lick up it so quickly that I must drop it onto the bed — onto the patch indeed, that must most urgently be obscured, and is now being obscured by flame.

I watch for a moment, suffused with wonder. Before realising that this salvation of flame will be my ruination too if I don’t quickly put a stop to it. Though Kate sometimes forgets, the jug by my bowl has blessedly been refilled and I clutch it to my waistcoat. When I am sure that every last trace of blood has been burnt blacker than a pirate’s heart, I throw the water over it. But it doesn’t go out. The flames are dampened down in the centre, but at the edge, they are still burning. ‘Fire!’ I shout. ‘Fire!’ And here comes Cook in a very uncomely dressing gown, and Mister Thomas in his shirt tails. Cook has instinctively grabbed her wash jug on the way. She slooshes the contents onto the flames in small splashes, just where it is needed — Cook, I suppose, is the one of us most familiar with the ways of fire. Kate enters, belatedly, her hair all done up with rags, like she is preparing for her wedding day.

‘What’s the boy done now?’ she asks.

‘Only gone and burnt his own bed,’ says Cook.

‘Well he’s not having mine,’ says Kate.

‘No he’s not,’ says Cook, and they’re both of them talking over me as if I’m just as vanished as that part of the bed where the blood used to be. ‘He’ll be sleeping on a blanket on the floor tonight, and we’ll see what the mistress has to say about it in the morning.’

We stand gazing at the smoking, blackened hole in my bed.

‘What happened, boy?’ asks Mister Thomas.

‘My candle,’ I say. ‘It fell.’

‘It fell?’ says Cook, raising an eyebrow. She wafts her hand in front of her face and I notice the smoke in the air for the first time: how it has thickened and greyed the whole room.

‘I dropped it. I was startled.’

‘By what?’

I look about. There is so little in the room that there is almost nothing to blame. And then I see, on my own foot, a drop of dried blood. Sitting on my toe like a ladybird. I must tear my eye away from it before they see what I am seeing, and I throw my gaze to the floor in the far corner where I find, with relief, an answer. A couple of tiny droppings on the floorboards.

‘By a mouse!’ I say, with such relief that I fear I have made myself implausible. Cook says,

‘You really are some kind of ridiculous boy if you are startled by a mouse.’

Kate shakes her head and shuffles out, yawning.

Cook follows with a backward look that means to cut through me but I am wearing an expression that I know says nothing, no guilt and no knowledge. It is the look I learned to wear when Ma was drunk and accusing and I knew she’d take her hand to me no matter what and only this look would save it from being a birching. It’s a good look, well practised, and Cook sees in it only ignorance and sorrow at having nowhere to sleep and so she leaves Mister Thomas in there with me, trying to persuade the window open so that the smoke might have somewhere to stay the night, too, that isn’t my room.

‘Now it might be cold,’ he says, ‘but it’s better than breathing burnt straw. There we are. You leave that open for now. I’ll get you a new blanket.’

I move not a muscle. As though I am shocked, and in some ways I am, as I had no plan to burn my bed and might have put myself sorely in danger by doing so. And yet I did not feel my heart thump horribly, was not frightened and now have no feeling but victory, a victory I am trying not to allow to grow inside me, for fear it would crack a smile onto my face, which would never do, a smile being most inappropriate to one who has just cremated her mistress’s furniture to hide the fact she is hiding her sex. But when Mister Thomas at last returns with not one but two warm blankets, and one of them clearly the softer sort that the mistress herself uses on her bed, and shuts the door very tenderly as if not to startle me, I let myself dissolve into tears. I curl up next to my charred mattress. I do not sleep. Cannot, for wondering how to prevent my body from betraying me, or threatening to betray me, every month. And there is the more immediate problem of tonight, and tomorrow, and as many days as it takes for my excess fluids to be drained from my body. I disposed of one bloody clout in an alleyway and another in the fire when Cook left it unattended for a few moments. I have another, wrapped in brown paper, curled up on itself like a dead animal in the bottom of my trunk. I cannot run through Kate’s stock in this manner and must find some way of washing and drying my own, or stealing some stranger’s or God knows what.

Some time after midnight, I rise to pack a clean clout between my legs, and stand for many minutes looking out at the moon spilling its silver light over the rooftops, hardly noticing the chill of the open window until I begin to shiver with it. How do women bear this? Why, they speak to each other. Share secrets. But who will share secrets with me? The answer comes to me very coldly. There is only one person in the whole of London who knows I am a woman, and will not reveal me.

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Smoking Maketh the Man

Ma stops calling. At Christmas, she sends me a small gift, a ribbon, which is a poor gift for me, who cannot wear a ribbon. I give it to Kate, who is very taken with it. The message of its impersonal delivery I understand quite plainly. She was never the kindest mother to me, but to be disowned entirely is something hard to bear. Still, I bear it. I suppose there are many who are orphaned before thirteen, but fewer who are orphaned while their mother still lives.

But the past keeps tipping its hat to us, and doesn’t mind what we do with our calendar, or how much 1702 should be sliced like a fish’s fleshy body away from the eyeless head of 1701. The new year is never so far from the old. Only a few weeks later, I am taking a message to the Strand, going through Covent Garden for no good reason except that I like to see what is being traded, and I spy my mother across the market. Straight away I understand why she has stopped calling. Her belly’s blown up like there’s a whole theatre inside it. I watch her cross the cobbles cautiously, as though she might fall over at any minute, which I suppose she might with that enormous belly balanced over such a tiny pair of shoes. So, I think, we are to have another brother or sister, who will probably never meet either one of us, or even know that we came before. I don’t show myself to her. From the shape of her, she is carrying an entire orphanage.

Whereas from the shape of me, I am not a woman at all. However, Nature may yet give me away. A waistcoat may flatten my breasts, but it cannot flatten the female note of my voice. Fred the butcher’s boy is barely a year older than I am, and by no means as tall, yet his pipes are cracking between boyhood and manhood like a door that’s half kicked in. The bad music of two of him present at once in the same sentence — boy Fred and man Fred — has Kate stifling a smile with a hand. And when he has left, Mister Thomas says that’ll be me, too, before too long. And it must be, if I am to keep my warm bed. The taller I grow, the more folk will think it peculiar if I am still singing descant and not getting the words from a more gravelling place. But how to make it so?

Putting my mind to the problem for several days yields nothing. The thought keeps me awake for hours, and what sleep I have is disturbed by dreams of being cast out and made a vagabond. But on the morning I declare a deeper voice impossible and surrender myself to the natural outcome of losing my job and shelter, the answer presents itself. Leaning up against the doorframe, I am breathing out a sigh, watching a thrush bash a snail out of its shell in the kitchen garden and thinking of my inevitable un-shelling, when a deep voice growls from behind me to get my skinny arse inside and get the breakfast things on the table. I turn to see Cook’s munched-up mouth and the idea floods into me. I will take up tobacco! For isn’t it so that Cook, who always takes a pipe by the stove whenever she can, has a voice almost as deep as Mister Thomas’s? And isn’t it true that one of the fishwives back in Broxholme, Mrs Planter, whose voice could scrape barnacles off any ship’s hull, was also fond of tobacco? In an instant, I make it my mission to smoke.

This is harder than I would hope. Not because it is difficult to purloin the means: I filch a simple clay pipe from the back pocket of a gentleman at church, and Cook keeps her tobacco in a preserves jar on a high shelf that is easily climbed to. No, the difficulty is rather that I have no instruction, and sense I am doing it wrong. Without asking Cook, which is unwise at best, I have no means of learning how to do it correctly. I light the tobacco with a spill, sucking at the pipe to pull the flame down onto the tamped leaves. I smoke leaning out of the attic window when there is no one of consequence on the street below, sucking smoke into my mouth and releasing it in little puffs. But having observed Cook often enough, I am at a loss to know how she blows it through her nostrils, or holds it inside her lungs while she spouts some poisonous homily about young people’s morals. And despite two weeks of daily smoking, I know it is not reaching my voice at all.

Fortunately for me, Demoiselle de Vaucresson is exchanging messages with a tediously entitled man who lives at the Inns of Court. The man believes she will make him a very good wife, without considering whether he would make her a very good husband, and she must constantly rebuff his messages in order to prevent him embarrassing her. Unfortunately for Demoiselle de Vaucresson, he considers this a form of courtship, presumably having noted that women, like granite and other unyielding substances, can sometimes be worn down by persistent drips. Thus I am regularly required to take small unperfumed envelopes to Middle Temple, and often detained at that end for a cloying letter to be written in response, meaning that the time needed for my errand can be unpredictable. The quickest route takes me in both directions through Covent Garden, where the barrow boys, alongside calling out their wares in amusing ways, are sometimes given to smoking. It occurs to me that if I run the first and second legs of my errand, I can tarry in the market without seeming to have taken inordinately long, and perhaps gain some information that will be of some advantage to me in terms of forcing my voice to a deeper octave.

So it is that one somewhat frosty October morning, I sprint like a thing pursued to Covent Garden, then slow my steps and regain my breath as I turn the corner into it, so as not to draw too much attention. Before long I spy a group of boys smoking from a stubby pipe. I am afraid to approach so large a group, as they might pack-dog upon me. Instead I wander between the stalls, glancing at them from time to time until I see an older man break them up, and the friendliest looking one come back my way, a now empty pipe in one hand, and a couple of oranges — oranges! — juggled in the other. I marvel that a boy can be so free with something I have never so much as tasted, giving no thought to the chance that he might drop one of the fruits on the ground and spoil it. He sees me watching him and says,

‘What’s your game, eh?’

And when I don’t know how to answer,

‘What you looking at?’

‘The oranges,’ I say. He throws me one, and I surprise myself by catching it, but only clumsily and accidentally, squashing it with my wrist against my chest.

‘Have it,’ he says.

I put the orange in my pocket.

‘Nah, don’t be silly, give it back,’ he says. ‘My uncle’d kill me if I started giving em away.’

I hand it back to him.

He laughs. ‘Some kind of country idiot, are you? When someone gives you something, just scarper with it!’

‘Scarper with it?’

‘Of course. Take off. Show em your heels. Yes?’

None of his words are quite working in my head. I nod a half yes, and he mimes running with the top half of his body only, pumping his arms.

‘Well then,’ he says.

‘You want me to take off?’

‘Isn’t that what your kind do?’ he asks. My livery marks me out as a footboy, of course.

‘Not with other people’s property,’ I say, regaining some ground on the basis of the words ‘your kind’.

‘It’s your property now,’ he says. ‘Put it in your pocket. It’s a sample. Does your master or mistress want oranges? ‘

‘No,’ I say, putting the orange in my pocket, where it makes a rude bulge.

‘What’s your game then?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why did you say you were interested in my oranges?’

It is time for honesty, though I am afraid he is going to laugh at me.

‘I would like you to teach me to smoke,’ I say.

I am not wrong about the laugh, but he recovers himself quickly.

‘I see,’ he says. ‘I see. You got anything to do it with?’

I bring out the pouch of tobacco and hand it over.

‘All right then,’ he says, sniffing it. ‘This is not the best, but it will do.’ He feeds the white mouth of his pipe like it hasn’t been fed in an age, though I saw him smoking not a few minutes ago. He goes over to a friend of his who is selling roasted chestnuts, and uses a pair of ember tongs to set a tiny coal on the tobacco, sucking and puffing before putting the ember, and the tongs, back where he found them and returning to me. He sucks and puffs, then he offers it over, and I do the same. Only I know it’s not the same, and I suspect he is the kind of boy who will point that out to me, and sure enough he does, laughing himself onto his haunches.

‘Look at you, like a little kettle or something. You must suck it in,’ he says, taking the pipe out of my hands. ‘Breathe in! Suck it right down into your lungs, like this.’

He demonstrates, and the smoke disappears. He holds his breath for a few minutes, his eyes saying see? — and then he releases it in a long and satisfied stream. He passes the pipe back over.

‘Breathe in! Like it’s a big lungful of sea air or something. Breathe it right down inside you!’

I do as he says, and start coughing straight away.

‘That’s the bones of it,’ he says. ‘Try again!’

I try again, and cough again.

‘Takes practice,’ he says. I hand it back to him, thinking it better that I practice when he isn’t around to laugh at me. Yet I feel a little light-headed from the smoke, and warmed by his company. I start asking him about his business, and how long he’s been a barrow boy, and whether he likes it, and he tells me all about his uncle, whose barrow it is, and how the oranges never tally with the takings whether he takes them or not, and he gets beaten regardless, so he might as well give them to any person he likes the look of, but never a grown up. His uncle works in a slaughterhouse. His job is bringing death to the cows and sheep and pigs that are herded into London from the villages round abouts. He says he takes great pleasure in it. He doesn’t always like to do it fast. Sometimes he likes a slow cut, and watching the animal bleed very slowly, its eyes white and widening. And then he comes home, tallies up the takings from the orange barrow, and beats his nephew.

‘Do you not hate him for beating you?’ I ask, because I’ve never seen anyone talk about their beatings so cheerfully.

‘Pith and peel,’ he says. And then looking at my puzzled face he says, ‘You know, like an orange.’ (Though I don’t know, because I’ve never opened an orange: the one he gave me is getting hot in my pocket.) ‘Pith and peel on the outside, throw it away, means nothing. It’s not the fruit, is it. The fruit is inside. Now,’ he says, as if being reminded. ‘You might need a lemon. Do you have the money for a lemon?’

‘I do,’ I say, ‘but why would I need a lemon?’

‘Girls don’t like smoke on your breath if you’re trying to kiss them. Sucking on a lemon will do the trick. Or gargling salt water if you can’t abide lemons. Both, if you want to be sure of that kiss.’

He laughs, and I thank him. I ask him more questions and he answers them all. He tells me I’m the most interesting person he’s met in many a long day, though when I think about it he has done most all of the talking and doesn’t know a single thing about me, excepting that I am a footboy who cannot smoke.

The thought must occur to him at just the same time.

‘I’m Jim Coker,’ he says, and I tell him ‘Mark Read,’ and we shake on it like proper gentleman. And then I run off to the Inns of Court, deliver my mistress’s letter, collect her unwanted suitor’s reply, and run home again by a parallel route.

After meeting Jim Coker I practice smoking every evening, hanging out of the attic window in the bitter night air, until I can smoke like he does. Even though it makes my fingers brown and my spit bitter, I promise myself I will do it every day, to make my voice a more manly thing. Soon I don’t have to promise myself at all, because it’s something I need to do, quite as much as I need to eat or relieve myself.

My next question is how to be stronger. If I were to be a gentleman, in his powdered wig and waistcoat and box of snuff, I would likely not need to think about such a thing. But those in the trades or in service must use their bodies more, and here the men and women differ more greatly in what they can carry and lift. Though women have the strength to lift children and baskets full of laundry, they just as often puff and struggle, where men will lift whole hods of stone onto their shoulders, and one time I saw four men lift the corpse of a dead dray horse, on a tarpaulin, onto the back of a cart. I wouldn’t want there to be a time where a womanly weakness of arm might give me away. So I make it my business to offer as much lifting and carrying as the household needs. Even though it is not strictly my duty, and I must be careful not to make myself dirty, I fill the coal bucket as high as I can, hold it at arm’s length away from me, and take it unnecessarily up and down the stairs.

The months go on in this manner. I smoke and I carry the heaviest things I can manage, and on trips to and from Middle Temple, you will find me for at least a short time at Jim Coker’s barrow, so that in the gaps between customers I might listen to all he has to say on the world, and especially on girls, so I know better what a boy of my age should be thinking. I would take all of this from you, were you still in England. I would learn by your example as I always did. But Jim talks easily, and though he would never sense my thoughts as you did, I look to him as a kind of brother.

One afternoon late in the year, when Demoiselle de Vaucresson has gone to Norwich for the week without requiring me to accompany her, I tell him about the maps I studied in Captain Read’s library. About the names of those islands far to the west of us, and those things Mister Lampard said about the birds bright as fruit, and the summer all year long, and the whole barrels of sugar and spices, more precious than gold. And also what I have read about in Captain Read’s library about islands inhabited by men that have a second head growing out of their chests. And the diseases like sprue, and King’s Evil, which only come to sailors in hot climes, and no-one knows how or why.

‘I do not fancy going to sea,’ he says, and I feel sorry to have mentioned all the strange head-in-your-chest people or the diseases, because he might have been happy enough to think about the fruit-coloured birds and the all-year summer. He is juggling oranges as always in the hope of catching somebody’s eye to sell them to, and I am leaning against one of the uprights under the market awning, hands in my pockets, because the rain is coming down something fierce. Against the early-dark afternoon sky, the oranges look like balls of flame.

‘I expect those diseases are very rare,’ I say.

‘Maybe,’ he says, ‘but I do not like to be on the water.’

He drops an orange and it goes rolling under the cart. He bends to retrieve it, saying,

‘Ships can sink. And where would I be when they do but at the bottom of the ocean, where there are no oranges or pretty girls?’

As he straightens himself, he is eyeing a couple of those same pretty girls who were walking with a chaperone on the other side of the square, but are now sheltering under a large canopy.

‘You cannot swim,’ I ask?

‘For sure I cannot swim, and wouldn’t want to. Swimming’s for fishes.’

‘My brother and I learned for sport,’ I say. ‘To see what fell out of the sailor’s purses in the harbour. And keeping cool in the dew ponds. If there were ever a day when neither of us was working, I could teach you.’

‘I wouldn’t want to go to sea,’ he says again, looking me hard in the eye.

‘I’m not asking,’ I say, although he knows that I was, in a fashion.

‘You shouldn’t go either,’ he says, starting his juggling again. ‘Sailors are a rough lot, and unless you were as rough as the rest of them, or an officer, you’d get knocked about worse than I get from my uncle.’

‘Maybe I will be an officer,’ I say. ‘I have an education. My father was a captain.’

He catches all three oranges and squints me rotten.

‘I do believe, friend, that your father was a pirate.’ This much of my adopted story, I have told him.

I unpeel my spine from the upright and put my cupped hand a little way out into the torrent. Water is pouring off the edge of the awning and it fills quickly. He is jawing on about my villainous father, and how badness must run in my blood, being only halfway through a categorising of my low-born characteristics when I splash it in his direction.

‘Beefhead!’ he says, laughing. He spies a bucket by the flowerstall, nothing in it now but water, and as he darts the short distance to get it, I shout ‘Faster than any beefhead you’ve ever befriended!’ and sprint in the other direction, weaving through the covered stalls, looking for some way to outwit him, but knowing I won’t escape him unless I run all the way back to Albemarle Street. And that, of course, is not the game.

And here he comes, in a zig-zag line after me, hopping from this foot to that and only slightly disadvantaged by the bucket that he has in both hands, like a great big present he wants to give me, slopping itself out very slightly side to side. Both of us annoying stall-holders and customers in equal measure, I circle back and he circles back after me, all the time getting closer. Finally he has me cornered almost back where we began, and there’s only a table of vegetables between us and behind me only the street and the rain. So just as I see he’s ready to soak me, I leap back into the rain and soak myself, head to toe.

‘Damn you, beefhead,’ he says, ‘you take all the fun out of the chase!’ And chucks the bucket hard at me. I’m meant to catch it, but I’m looking at something else. Someone else, sheltering in a doorway. Ma. In a garish pink-and-green confection, so open at the neck that her breasts are more out than in. The bucket hits me hard in the belly and I fold to the ground, the breath knocked out of me.

‘Damn me!’ he says. ‘What sort of catching is that? You alright?’

It takes a couple of goes before the breath fills my lungs again. He comes out into the rain, puts out his hand to me where I lie.

‘Come on now, it’s nothing,’ he says. ‘Pith and peel!’

I nod, taking his hand, and he pulls me onto my feet and in under the awning. He follows my gaze. A gentleman approaches Ma in the doorway. He takes his coat off and makes a canopy of it, over his head. She joins him beneath it and off they go, down the street. ‘Not like you to be eyeing up the ladies,’ says Jim.

‘Not a lady,’ I say.

‘No, I can see that,’ he says, ‘lady of the night, not a lady —‘

‘My mother,’ I say, finishing the sentence before he holes the ship any further.

‘Blimey,’ he says.

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘What?’

‘Father a pirate, mother a whore.’

‘No such thing.’

‘I was respectable once. She was a seamstress, and he was a sea captain with a letter of marque.’ (Skipping the pebble of truth over the cold waters of the real story, where my father was a common sailor, of the kind that likes to clonk women on the head.)

‘Then the lesson is watch your step,’ says Jim. ‘How are the mighty fallen, and other good bible verses I’ll wager.’

He sees that I’m shivering.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We can’t stand here wet through. No-one’s buying in this rain. I’ll ask Alf to keep an eye on the barrow. Let’s nip into the Three Tuns for a half. Dry out a bit. They have a good fire there.’

But even with the good fire, something doesn’t feel right in me. That half of ale sits wrong in my belly, as if the hops were off. Or as if that bucket bruised me more than I realised.

‘Hey chin up,’ says Jim, ‘she’s not your mother anymore, is she, she’s given you away for a servant.’

But his cheeriness doesn’t get to the insides of me, where it might do me some good. The ache in my belly gets wider and deeper, and I don’t tell him, because he will feel bad about throwing the bucket at me, even though it was my fault for not catching it.

When I let myself in through the scullery door, Cook is scowling at herself in the back of the ladle. She startles as I enter and hangs it on its hook with a motion and look that suggests it’s been badly behaved.

‘What is wrong with you, sneaking in so?’

‘Nothing is wrong with me,’ I say.

‘You are wrong there,’ she says. ‘And you can wipe that smile off your face, too.’

‘I’m not smiling,’ I say. Whatever’s been painted on my face by this belly pain that has grown deeper since the bucket and the bad ale cannot be a smile.

‘You might have fooled Mrs Fredericks, but you can’t fool me. You’re no kind of gentleman.’ She says this with a flourish, and fear pricks my heart for the seconds it takes me to realise that she is casting aspersions on my class, not my pretended sex. She places a cleaned cooking pot back on its shelf. ‘Don’t you know the King is Dead?’

‘How dead?’

‘How dead?’ she says. ‘Very dead, I should say. Dead enough for a funeral.’

‘From being thrown off his horse two weeks ago,’ says Mister Thomas, coming in for his supper.

‘Yes,’ says Cook, ‘who knew you could die from a broken collarbone? All from the horse stumbling on a molehill, too. Killed by a mole! To think a blind rat could manage what all those awful Jacobite assassins couldn’t.’

‘Who is to be king now then?’ I ask.

‘That’s the very worst of it,’ says Cook.

‘Another Dutchman?’ I ask.

‘Worse than a Dutchman. A woman.’

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A Footboy is Not So Lowly as He Sounds

In my innocence, I think the house mine. That fine stone house, with its slow-ticking parlour clock and its grand walnut table. For am I not Mrs Read’s grandson? Am I not her only heir? The old woman did not consider she might be about to get into bed for eternity. Though she had thought us muddy sorts, my Ma fit only for scrubbing, and me too much my mother’s son, in her last weeks she had come to calling me dearest, to pinching my cheek and ruffling my hair. In short, she had changed her mind, but not her will.

Shortly before the funeral, distant cousins arrive from Northumberland. There are pests in the house, they say, and might I vacate the premises while it is cleaned? Young as I am, I understand them.

So along with my clothes, I take one tiny book from Captain Read’s library that will hardly be missed, about the West Indies, which is where I place you, brother, because it is so much more heartening to imagine than your skeleton clattering about the pebbles on the seabed of the English Channel. The day after I move out, my mother meets with a solicitor in his offices, who makes it plain to us that her late husband, and therefore his son — he says this so markedly that I wonder whether he really believes the word — were, and are, disinherited.

How quickly money runs away, when needed. Soon we are reduced to stale ha’penny loaves and the cheapest tallow candles. Ma says there is nothing for it but to go into service. Not her, because she is sure she doesn’t have the temperament for it, but I am young, which they will take to mean biddable, and grand folk prefer the more affordable wage that youth allows. I am to ‘live in’, she says. She has her own plan for herself, she says. What plan, she says not, but I know she will not be returning to needle and thread, on account of her eyes and fingers. I am to help her out until she is on her feet again.

Mrs Fredericks has often mentioned which big house is hiring (always with an opinion) and is not unhappy to receive me on her doorstep and offer advice. Poor thing, she says, cooing me in, giving me a biscuit. It’s a shame, she says, that some people have no morals when it comes to money, because these people were not so quick to come to the house when the old lady was alive, but being in service is a respectable calling, and boys from good families do well in livery. She tells me that an unmarried French lady in Mayfair, name of Demoiselle de Vaucresson, is looking for a footboy, her last having run away to join the army. This being the war that may be about to begin any day now between England and France, and all manner of other countries, which is exciting footboys all over London, who fancy themselves for soldiers, thinking they might come back from war with a scar to impress the ladies, and a full belly on the King’s provisions, and a fat purse, and perhaps a medal or two. And maybe some part of themselves lopped off, although she does not suppose they are imagining that. The Grand Alliance has been reformed, armies all over Europe are recruiting young men, and it will not take very much to set them all at each other’s throats, for the fun of it as much as anything, but I mustn’t think of joining them. I asked after Adisa and she says Charles? Charles has been dismissed for taking off a glove. She herself is only there by the grace of God.

Footboys earn two shillings a week. My duties are all sorts of things that are not meet for women and too lowly for butlers, but I am given a fine blue coat for greeting guests in, or serving at table, and another for everyday wear, the whole uniform including undergarments, as Demoiselle de Vaucresson does not like her servants to be tatty on any level, including those levels she cannot see. I am given the room that I was jokingly promised only a few weeks ago by Adisa, an attic room with a chimney running through it, which at the time I take up the position is unbearably hot, being as it is June and there being only the smallest window in the gable end, and the cook, who is known throughout the household only as Cook, is given to cooking from dawn until dusk, preparing not only meals but all kinds of fancy pastries, meaning that the chimney barely cools down before it is heated up again.

Nevertheless I am glad to have a roof over my head, and a bed of my own, since I am getting too large to share with my mother. Though I had so recently had a much wider bed with a counterpane with burning birds embroidered upon it, which meant something to Mrs Read, in the between times I have been shoved up with my mother again, in lodgings that are crawling black on their inside walls and home to all manner of insects. Thus, I am glad to havw something dry and warm (even if somewhat too warm) that houses, besides myself, only a few spiders.

The butler of the household is a Mister Thomas, who is a man born in the marshes. He has a thick accent and a crude laugh, though he squashes it all when he is butlering. Even though Demoiselle de Vaucresson has more than once caught him in his real voice, she is too French to notice the difference between the two Mister Thomases, only noting that one of them she can easily translate and the other one makes her question the functioning of her ears. Mister Thomas is the only person that Cook will recognise as being above her. By her reckoning she is above everyone else, including all other Cooks, and secretly including Demoiselle de Vaucresson, who after all by Cook’s tongue is one of the Filthy French, and not to be thought superior just because she has a deep purse.

Cook is a mean woman, given to lashing out with a wooden spoon as I go by. The minute she learned I was the late Mrs Read’s grandson she began calling me Lord and Master, as though Lords and Masters get sent out into the road to collect horse dung for the herb garden, or are made to scrub pans until their hands go the colour of peonies. Only on the second week do I understand from Mister Thomas that these are not my duties at all, and that I am something like an under-butler, who must sometimes move furniture for Kate to clean behind, and sometimes carry things too heavy for Cook, but am not what Mister Thomas calls a General Dogsbody. When I’m fully grown I will be a Footman, and that is no inconsiderable thing. As a footboy I must run messages, and assist Mister Thomas to serve meals, and I must accompany my mistress’s coach when she is visiting. On all occasions I may accept vails, which are coins pressed into my hand by Demoiselle de Vaucresson’s wealthy friends, and these alone have tripled my wages.

Nevertheless Cook continues to try it on. She takes special delight in giving me jobs that take me down into the cellar, because she knows it is full of rats. It is not only me she is mean to. She calls the housemaid, whose name is Kate, Miss Mustard, which leaden words (though I don’t understand them) have the effect of casting Kate’s eyes to the floor. She likes very much to talk about people’s body parts, so long as she is certain there will be no penalty. She would never dare say that Demoiselle de Vaucresson, whom she calls The Lady of the House, has a scraggy little arse (which she says to Kate), or any kind of arse at all. She would never comment on a gentleman’s legs but she is happy to comment on mine. She has tried more than once to pull my pizzle (as she likes to put it), but each time I dodge out of her way and she laughs. When she has put supper in the oven, she sits by the range on a three-legged stool, brings out a pouch of tobacco and a pipe from her skirts, holds a lit taper to the end and sucks, making big smacking noises with her froggy lips. She says it is good for her lungs. One time she blows smoke in my face as I go past and I see her on her deathbed, the sheets grey with yellow stains, and Cook coughing blood into a flannel and crying for the daughter she had who died as a baby. The vision so arrests me that I stop dead in front of her, and I suppose I must be looking at her strangely, for she startles and says ‘Get away from me now!’

Demoiselle de Vaucresson does not know me to be the grandchild of Mrs Read, since my mother told me to say nothing. Not because she knows it to be a lie — she has spread the tale so widely in London that I suspect she now believes it herself — but because she feared the Demoiselle, armed with this knowledge, would be unlikely to hire me for the reason that I might be ‘above myself’, though it is surely as impossible for me to be ‘above myself’ as it is for me to be on two floors of the house at once. But though Demoiselle de Vaucresson is ignorant of my thwarted prospects, Cook knows, because Mrs Fredericks told her. Cook is delighted to know, and in playful moods refers to me as Master Less, so that one time Kate said ‘Master Less?’ she said ‘Master Less-Than-He-Was!’ followed by a cackle of laughter.

Ma calls at the kitchen door every Saturday for my wages. I wonder when she will ever get back on her feet. Or whether she has, since her clothes are getting fancier. Silk bodices can’t be had from a footboy’s wages, and no-one can dress like a lady on six pounds a year. But I know she is resourceful.

I say as much to Mister Thomas, and tell him about sleeping under the gentleman’s bed in Exeter when I was a child, and he roars himself hoarse with laughter and says, yes indeed, those gentlemen’s beds can be very bouncy, yes indeed, and I feel heat come to my cheeks even though I am not at all sure what he thinks is so funny. When I say he must have been a very kind gentleman, because he gave my mother three sovereigns, Mister Thomas says he must have been a very sorry gentleman, to wake up and find himself so light in the purse, because that wasn’t at all what you would pay for a cuddle with a woman you met in a hostelry. That is when I understand him. I tell Mister Thomas that my mother is not a whore, and his smile collapses into something more serious and he says of course not, she is a woman without recourse, which makes me hope he thinks better of her. But the next time she calls, I compare her clothes to the clothes of the women that walk up and down Marybone with nowhere to go.

Whatever Ma is doing to put herself in fine dresses, she is doing it very well. When she sees me now, she pats me on the head, as though I am an animal she is very fond of, but she does not ask me how I am keeping, or whether I like running messages and serving pastries so that she can take away my earnings to put a feather in her hat.

Then I get a fleabite. Fleabite, I am sure it is, except for it stays, making a great lump of itself. Then another comes up on the other side to match it. Now I know these are not fleabites at all, but the end of my being a footboy unless I am careful. Until this time it has been easy to be a boy. Never do I empty myself in a public place. Never am I bathed by anyone but myself, so it’s simple enough to conceal what isn’t there. In looks I have always been enough like a boy to be mistaken for one, and in manner I have learned to adopt more fully the spirit of the name I go by. You, I think, wouldn’t cower in the attic and wait to be called: you would be dressed and downstairs as soon as you were woken, seeing who was about, and what, if anything, you could pilfer. And you, I think, would not accept that Cook could smack you on the legs with a wooden spoon as you passed, but would, for revenge, toy with her condiments, and put a little mustard powder in her morning restorative, not so much to make her sick, but enough to ensure that it never tasted right on any day she had made free with her utensils. You wouldn’t think twice about stealing a plum from the table when Cook was in the larder getting flour to make a pie, and popping it straight into your mouth, and using only nods and shakes of the head until you could slip out of the room and birth it from your mouth like a hairless purple puppy, and bite into it with relish for the sheer taste of liberty.

Living the name that everyone calls me has made it easy to have a boy’s ways, a boy’s wiles, a boy’s boldness with things that don’t belong to him. So when those two fleabites that aren’t fleabites come calling a chill runs through me that could freeze the great wide bounty of the Thames. I flatten the bumps with my hands, but can hardly walk around all day holding on to myself like a woman caught bathing. I have no wish to be discovered.

Fortunately my uniform includes a waistcoat. I note by experiment that the fabric is so firm that my bumps are perfectly flattened when the waistcoat is buttoned. I only hope I will not grow so bosomy that it will not disguise me. The simple reason being this. The more I see of the relative freedoms of girls and boys, of women and men, the more I knew I must turn from boy to man, and be a man all of my days.

For example. Only girls and women have babies, and by all accounts that is a fearsome thing, worse than getting a lead bullet shot into your belly by a musket, worse than being entirely run over by a dray cart, and in the same manner, as often as not, fatal. But all women must bear it, because thousands of years ago a woman bit into an apple. Why Eve’s sin should be visited on all of us I do not know, and it makes as good a reason as any to go to church with my ears blocked with lint. I have heard from the men that sometimes visit Kate and smoke outside the back door when I am chopping kindling that having babies, and the thing that leads to having babies, is all that women are good for. As a rule girls are not trained in a trade, or in writing (to be clerks), or in investing (to be bankers), because all that matters about them are their body parts, and especially their womb, and how many children it will make their husband. Easily one time in ten, having a baby will make you die, which is a sorry end to a sorry beginning. So many men have three or four wives because they have killed the first two or three by putting a baby in them.

Second example. As noted before, men make the world. They make all the things in the world that have use and will last, and the women, if they make anything at all, make things of no consequence. Every utensil I use, every chair that I sit on, every carriage in the streets, every sword, every ship, every house, every castle, was made by men. Women make food, which is digested into dung. They make clothes, which are worn into rags. Higher class women embroider pointless patterns on cushions — see Mrs Read and her crocuses — or worse, they make ‘samplers’ which demonstrate various stitches to no great purpose, since they will never be employed as a seamstress. No wonder men consider women to be useless except in the matter of making babies. Babies is the one thing women make that lasts for a lifetime (though some babies’ lifetimes are short), and have some utility in the world, if they are boy babies — but this is nothing due to the prowess of women, since the ability is natural and not in their control. Female dogs and rats and spiders are as good as spawning young as women are, better, mostly, because (I think) they do not so often die of it. Where everything that men make sets them apart from the animals, the one lasting thing made by women puts us squarely among them.

Third example. Men may have adventures. A man who has adventures, no matter what their nature, is a hero. If any woman dares to have an adventure, even so small an adventure as an unaccompanied excursion to the wrong part of the city, she is deemed either a ‘fallen woman’ or a disgrace, whose adventure must never be mentioned. If her adventure involves consorting with a man to whom she isn’t married, so much the worse. Whereas a man may sail across the ocean, may murder people in the name of his country, may steal gold in the name of his queen, and he will be called a hero, and may be given a medal, a knighthood, or a seat in the parliament making laws to his own advantage. A man’s smallest adventure will be celebrated in a tavern, enlarged upon and told a dozen times, and no-one will think any worse of him for doing so. A woman’s largest adventure must be kept under her tongue, and sit there like a sugared almond she fears to suck upon. It seems that shopping is as much of an adventure as a good woman will admit to herself, or to polite company. Mrs Read called going to her milliner’s ‘an expedition’.

For all these reasons, I am determined to keep the advantage of being male. Even if it is not so much advantage as I would have being the son of a vicar, or a clerk, or a gentleman, it is far more advantage than the daughter of any of those, to find I can move freely around the world, and make my mark upon it in some lasting fashion. And not to be thought less than anyone of my size and upbringing, or to be considered simple in the head, or weak in the arms, for the lack of some extra flesh between the legs. For this reason I will swallow the small restriction of wearing a waistcoat, regardless of the weather, to make my chest look more like Adam’s and less like Eve’s.

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Unregulated Emotion is as Deadly as the Pox

Calamity arrives on Mrs Read’s doorstep in the shape of a man. By the state of him, vomited out by the sea. Such a rotten-looking man. Hair like a mop for ashes, and beard tatty as a rook’s nest, and half an arm gnawed off by something only half hungry. How it might have chewed through to his bone I cannot imagine, as his skin has the brown toughness of a pair of boots. His uneaten arm ends in tree root fingers gnarled around a cup of brandy. A cup, I note, and not one of Mrs Read’s fancy glasses, but a cup from the kitchen which I’m guessing Charles knew to be the right container from the barely detectable wideness of Mrs Read’s eyelid or from a tightness in her upper lip, which Charles well knows how to read as a silent instruction in matters of household deportment. I arrive to survey the scene through the crack of the door as Charles finishes pouring the liquid into that cup, with the man thanking him in a voice unnaturally loud, saying he had the shakes very bad and couldn’t do without it and that a whole succession of ships’ doctors had prescribed him brandy though he had generally only been able to find rum. He really does look like something about him is going off, and has a smell about him too, the way fish does when it’s been in the sun a few hours. Plenty of sailors came in and out of the harbour at Broxholme, and some of them were worn at the edges, if we were their first stop after a long voyage. But never have I seen any like this one. His trousers are half a pair of brown moleskins and half a pair of green pantaloons, though I can’t be sure he has chosen the better leg of each, since the moleskins have a hole at the knee, and the pantaloons, as I notice when he turns his cup hand to Charles, have a tear across the situpon.

Ten minutes earlier: Mister Rotard standing by the steps and a strange noise leaking through the window of the front parlour. Mister Rotard suggests with his eyes that we take the basement steps. We enter into the kitchen to find Mrs Fredericks standing dead still, floury hands crab-crouched on the edge of the table like Lady Upton about to play the harpsichord, and eyes raised to the ceiling to aid her ears. Seeing myself and Mister Rotard enter, she jolts into action, washes her hands at the tap, dries them on a cloth, and tells us to wait, heading upstairs towards the source of the noise. Mister Rotard does as he is told, sitting himself down at the kitchen table. I stay on my feet, obeying the same command for as long as five minutes, but finally am too curious to wait, and dodge his attempt to snatch my wrist, and head towards the noise.

The source of the noise is plainly Mrs Read. From the view afforded by the hinge-gap of the half-open door, she is prostrate on her long couch, half buried under a crooked arm and three of her cushions, making a sound like the wind through a crack in the world. The half-armed man drinking brandy out of a kitchen cup has brought her some great sorrow.

Mrs Fredericks has had the whole situation from Charles, who has several times gone in and out. She whispers what she knows. The sailor handed Mrs Read a letter written by your father several months ago. He served on Captain Read’s ship, and now he is finally returned to London with the letter he has come to deliver for the promise — for the letter offers this promise — that he will be rewarded for delivering the news. Mrs Read is in floods all over her cushions, weeping like she been hoarding her sobs for the day when they might be needed and now has the whole larder of tears to get rid of as quickly as possible, before they moulder away. But the reward has not yet surfaced, or the sailor would not be standing there waiting for the storm to subside, and a purse to rise out of it.

Had Mrs Read not been in spate she would have shouted him off her carpet, because even now one of his shoes (the one boasting a strange white toe peeking out of it like a mouse from a skirting board) is trespassing upon the Not To Be Trodden Upon, as though his feet long for something soft to nestle in, after so many months on the hard boards of a ship’s deck. Since she doesn’t look at him, I look on him very hard, reckoning him up: what looks to be a stolen Spanish jacket (a knife slit in its side), a squat veiny neck with the black smudge of a tattoo peeking out from his shirt. His lips scarfed white at the edges. He has the gulping habit of one who prefers his spirits by the tankard.

Too late, I am reminded of Mister Lampard’s words about deer. Not ‘what gentlemen may hunt, common men must poach,’ but how you must shoot your prey quickly, before they feel your eyes on their flank, and flee. I have looked at this sailor too hunter-like. He turns his head and his eyes look right at mine, or at least, at the crack, where he senses mine to be.

‘Come in!’ he says, though it is not his place to invite me into Mrs Read’s parlour, which is surely more mine than his. But I do not think to disobey him. Mrs Fredericks is vanished back down the stairs like a mouse meowed at, but I want to see him better. So in I go. But only a few inches, in case I need to get out. Charles is standing close by, his dark eyes on me like a weight.

The sailor says, ‘You are John’s son?’ (Correcting himself) ‘Captain Read’s son? I detect a likeness.’

This cannot be possible but people see what suits them.

‘And who are you?’ I ask, as boldly as if I am John son’s, and more boldly than I would dare were Mrs Read not wailing into her cushions.

‘Only a poor sailor,’ he says, ‘and not one you need ask after. Only come to deliver a letter from your father to your grandmother.’

At the mention of a letter, Mrs Read’s wail rises higher, the sailor takes a gulp of his brandy, and I now see the letter like a handkerchief on the floor. I say,

‘My father has been at sea so long that I have never known more of him than his name. The least I can ask of you is that you give me your own.’

The boldness in my voice is yours. I am as surprised by it as anyone. The sound coming out of Mrs Read drops a little.

‘Ezekiel Broom,’ he says, taking a gulp of brandy to wash down the awkwardness of those hard and soft sounds together.

Now I own his name like a woodsman owns the handle of his axe, and when he sees me staring at the sorry state of his clothes he apologises, saying he has been stranded for some time on an island in the Azores and has not taken the chance to repair himself, but rather came directly to deliver the message to Mrs Read so that he might have the means to repair himself. Which I understand, as we all do, to be a request for money.

‘Is my father returning?’ I ask.

A new noise from the sofa.

‘No, Master Read,’ says Ezekiel Broom. ‘He was carried off by the ague.’

‘And that’s not the worst of it,’ wails Mrs Read. ‘He lost his Letter of Marque! He lost his Letter of Marque!’

Why her son losing a letter is worse than his being carried off, which I know to mean dying, by the ague, by all accounts a fearsome disease, is a mystery to me. But it seems I am the only person in the entire household able to close this terrible business. Adisa and Mrs Fredericks, being servants, can do nothing unless instructed, and she who might instruct them can do nothing in this moment but water every flower on her cushions. I snatch up the letter and read the promised reward. Then take a careful diversion around the Not-to-be-Trodden-Upon, kneel, pick up Mrs Read’s damp hand, and squeeze it tightly, whispering my question in her ear.

‘In the armoire,’ she says weakly. ‘In a hatbox in the armoire.’

Not an ordinary opening, the opening of that hatbox. So many promissory notes in their denominations. So many coins. So much gold! I kneel before that hatbox as though it is a reliquary. Tears come like good friends to a funeral. I do not imagine I will ever get to my feet again. But then the thin smoke of wailing reaches me. Taking what is needed, I shut it all away. I will not think on it again, I tell myself, already knowing how it will itch me at night, the thought of such bounty so close, and how I might put handfuls in my pockets and walk out into the chill dark were it not for law and the threat of sisal around my throat.

Five golden sovereigns it costs to be rid of Ezekial Broom, and once he is gone, Mrs Fredericks and I help the stricken woman to her bed. I do not imagine Mister Rotard will be instructing me after all this, but he is entirely stuck on it. Presumably he is concerned his own paltry shilling might not be honoured if he abandons his duty, though the morning has been perfectly educational in its own way: how paralysed he was, and everyone else bar me, when there was action to be taken. He does not stir from the kitchen throughout the noise, and when he presumably hears the door open and close and sees the mismatched trouser legs of Ezekial Broom roil past the half-window, and he comes up to start our lesson, as he likes to call it, the one area of ignorance that I am troubled by, concerning the Letter of Marque, he waves away as being something that need not concern me.

Only later, in the kitchen, am I enlightened. Mrs Fredericks catches me reaching for a pinch of broken pie crust behind her back and says, ’You’ll be just like your father, then. A blooming pirate.’ A Letter of Marque, Adisa explains, is the piece of paper whose thickness measures the difference between gentleman and rogue. With this letter, authorised with the King’s signature and seal, a captain may call themselves a privateer, which is to say, a private adventurer licensed to capture and rob the ships of our enemies, which in any given year might be any number of countries, but for the last several years has been Spain and France. The booty is shared between captain, crew and crown, all of whom (most especially the crown) are exempt from hanging for piracy, on account of the signature and seal. Without a Letter of Marque? Be hanged for a pirate.

You would have something to say about that, how doing anything in the King’s name seems an excuse to slip under every one of the Ten Commandments, because God-something-or-others-the-King, so says the King, and he may instruct his citizens to do all the manner of unChristian things, and still call himself a Christian.

The question of how the precious letter was lost is a matter of considerable under-stairs gossip. Who would lose such a thing? Mrs Fredericks is certain your father turned pirate, losing it deliberately so as to keep all the plunder between himself and his men. The man who brought the letter, she observed, was a most unsavoury type, and exactly the sort to be crewing a pirate ship rather than a more respectable vessel. Our current housemaid, Sarah (Mrs Read is forever dismissing housemaids), confesses herself to have no opinion at all on the matter, probably because she imagines that young women aren’t expected or even desired to have an opinion, and that if she were to go so far as adopting an opinion, if word got about, it would quash all interest from the young men (delivery boys and footboys mostly) who court her with rough-picked flowers from the fields behind Liquor Pond Street, and other forms of treacled attention. Adisa is circumspect. He wraps his words in boxes within boxes until no one can tell what he means. I detect that he does not wish to offend Mrs Fredericks (with whom he has to work most closely) by disagreeing with her, but does not wish to join her in slandering his employer’s dead son. Eventually he says,

‘He was never the thieving sort.’

‘The rich do nothing but profit from others,’ says Mrs Fredericks. ‘So he bought a licence to thieve and then he lost it.

Adisa, who has a tray of silver cutlery to occupy his fingers, says to me quietly, ‘He was a good young man.’

Mrs Fredericks tuts and turns her back.

‘Serve him right that he lost it and gets treated the same as anyone else,’ she says, before furiously putting some carrots to the knife. ‘Some people will do anything for money.’

Adisa knows this. Adisa’s father was captured in his home country and sent to work in the colonies. The negro men were treated worse than the livestock on the ship, and given almost no space to lie down in, and no clean water, and not enough food, and so many of them died on the journey that the profit of the expedition was badly affected, but that this was all that was considered, the loss of profit, and not the loss of life. He has grown quiet, absorbed in polishing his own face off the back of a spoon. When Mrs Fredericks leaves us and the boiling carrots to go upstairs, I ask,

‘But did Captain Read become a pirate, just because he lost his letter?’

He looks at me oddly. I realise I should have used the words ‘my father.’ To correct myself, I ask,

‘Am I the son of a pirate?’

‘If he has no Letter of Marque,’ he says, ‘then yes, you are. And I am the son of a slave. But what our fathers are called by other men should not reflect on us. And a pirate is not the most terrible thing to be called. Especially since the ague has him, and he cannot be hanged, God rest his soul.’

‘Why?’

He grins. ‘Because he is already dead, Master Read.’

‘No, why is a pirate not the most terrible thing to be called?’

He lays down the shiny spoon and picks up a duller implement. He tells me that he and his father were slaves on a plantation until he was six years old. Pirates had the run of the island and the capital was built around their pleasure. Though there was drunkenness and what he calls ‘looseness with ladies’, there was also generosity. The pirates would buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street, and say everyone who passed must drink from it. Gold was so bountiful with them it might have been feathers or seashells. Many pirates were so giddy with it they would to rid themselves of it however they could. His father, waiting for his master outside a store, was handed the price of his family’s freedom by a pirate merry with drink. To the pirate it was merely an amusement.

‘He insisted my father must tell his master as soon as he came out of the store, and put the money straight into his hand, so that he could see the man’s face,’ says Adisa. ‘He thought it a terrific jest. But by that jest I am standing before you now. Polishing forks. In a very handsome jacket. A pirate is free to do as he pleases.’

‘But was he not already?’ I ask. Thinking how Captain Reed was born into this house with its rugs and its drapes, and had dinner every night with his mother at the walnut table.

‘I remember your father when he was a boy,’ says Adisa. ‘His mother would have him always in his best clothes, and he was not allowed to climb or run about. But boys like to do these things. The more you stop them, the more they want to do them. Sea is the place that people run away to, no? If they have been denied adventure, and seek it?

‘Girls like to do these things too, sometimes,’ I say.

Adisa roars with laughter.

‘Girls? No. Girls don’t run away to sea. Girls run away to get married.’

He finishes with the cutlery. Every piece is in its correct place.

But my place has changed. My asking so boldly for the sailor’s name — Ezekiel Broom, a name not easily lost — clattered through Mrs Read’s grief some sense of the steel in me which she recognised, wrongly, as the blood of a Read. If she doubted my provenance before, my insistence on a formal introduction made me her grandson. She reached an arm out, tendril-like, and called for me to come into it, to be contained by her grasp and by her whisper that I was her boy now, I was her boy. If she had fantasies that her son hatched another family in the New World, and would be gifting her with grandchildren just as soon as he reappeared, Ezekial Broom swept them away. A hard broom he was for her, a broom that tips the husks and dust of things over the step and into the cold. And a soft broom for me, that cozens a little mouse out of where it was born and allows it to run freely about the house.

Our mother takes your father’s death badly. He was the one thing that kept her respectable, and now she is, she bemoans, in danger of becoming some ragtag hen. Why would he go and get himself dead of ague! As if he has deliberately slighted her by doing so. Within two weeks she has sold her wedding ring, which brings welcome income while leaving room for the opportunity of more. I sense she would be shot of me too, were I not so profitable. Without a child in her lodgings, she might be more appealing to those who might be appealed to, but at the same time the crown she earns by loaning me twice a week to Mrs Read is a precious thing she would feel the loss of. Nevertheless I feel myself, in both education and influence, slipping almost imperceptibly from one household to the other.

Mrs Read calls me to her side more often, pats at her cushions, has me sit beside her. I wonder if all those cushions aren’t only to project her brittle bones from the hard surfaces around her (for her bones are as thin as sticks) but to shield her more generally from the harshness of a life in which she only obliquely participates. She will have me be the part of her that goes out into the world. I sense I am to have all the advantages of a Read, and slip my mother’s influence. And soon she asks my mother if I may stay with her some evenings, sleep and wake here. She will pay my mother no less in maintenance. My mother is surprisingly agreeable. Is there not greater chance of my discovery? Neither of us seem to believe so. In Mrs Read’s eyes I am so firmly her grandson now, that were she to walk in upon me bathing she would probably not see what I am missing.

Adisa is instructed to show me my sleeping quarters. In the entrance hall he pauses, very serious, and says,

‘Is it the truth you are Mrs Read’s grandson?’

He stares at me with not the smallest bit of give in his eyes. It is all I can do to say,

‘Why — why would you ask such a thing?’

‘We do not pay for the company of our grandchildren. We expect it. And we also give them pleasant rooms to sleep in, and not the coal shed.’

‘I am sleeping in the coal shed?’

He winks.

‘That is only what we call it. It is really very nice. It doesn’t even have a rat anymore. Only beetles.’

I watch his face: it stays very still, very earnest, his eyes looking into mine as though he is most concerned to be of help. And then he crumples into laughter.

‘You are my favourite boy,’ he says. ‘My very favourite boy. You are sleeping in the attic. You will like it. It is hot at this time of year, but not too cold in winter, because the chimney runs through it. You will like it.’

I keep looking at him to see if he will change his mind again, and when he sees that is what I am doing, he laughs even more. ‘Come, follow me,’ he says, going up the stairs.

I do as I’m told. He pauses on the landing outside Mrs Read’s bedroom and opens the other door on the same landing.

‘My room is in the attic. This is your room. It was your father’s.’ He gleans much amusement from my face. ‘We are going to have a fine time, together,’ he says. ‘We are going to be friends.’

But a few days later, in a fit of apoplexy after seeing your father’s name mentioned in a broadsheet, Mrs Read ups and dies.

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You Will Learn Nothing Good From Mister Dryden

I am not the only one not going by their name. Charles, the negro servant, corrects me the very first time we are alone. I have a question about the gloves but have no sooner begun with ‘Charles,’ then he stops me with a finger.

‘My name is not Charles,’ he says. ‘My name is Adisa.’

I might say my name is not Mark, to show him we are not so different, but if I told him my real name he would know we’re as different as cat and dog.

‘Adisa,’ he says again, as though my thinking was a kind of not listening.

I say it back to him, and though it is not a complicated name, I step over it uncertainly like an unlit path. He laughs.

‘Adisa,’ he repeats. ‘Remember it. Charles is my English name. Mrs Read gave it to me. There were two kings of that name I’m told, though I’m also told that the first had his head chopped off and the second was a fool who was thrown off the throne. So perhaps it is not a good name.’

‘I think it’s a good name,’ I say.

‘Adisa is a better name,’ he says. ‘It means One Who Makes His Meaning Clear. But you must call me Charles in front of Mrs Read.’

Is he a slave? Oh no, he says, he is a free man. He was a slave as a boy, but not now. He earns a wage with Mrs Read. He is saving, he says, tapping the side of his nose in a tradesman’s gesture. Saving, yes, in the hope he might one day afford a wife.

‘You would buy a wife?’

He barks a laugh. ‘No! No, you strange boy. Women must be kept though, they must be kept.’

Like horses? Like chickens? Wide eyed staring at him, I suppose, from the way he laughs again.

‘They have babies, you know. Wives will have babies when you marry them. They can’t be working then. So you have to work enough to keep all of you. You, you wife, and your babies too. That is how women cost, even when they have no price on them.’

Me thinking: that is how I would be enslaved.

But already I belong to Mrs Read.

She is conscious of how I reflect on her, with my country speech and common ways. Her son married down, and nothing to be done about that: many a clever young man’s made stupid by the tug of his loins. But no grandson of mine, she says, no grandson of mine, as though the person who grubbed about in Broxholme for eight years was another creature, and I have just now been born, entire, out of a flower, like a fairy boy in a story. No grandson of mine, knocking at my ears over and over with new rules that please or perplex me. No grandson of mine will be torn-trousered, or go unbreakfasted, no grandson of mine will ask for the sugar bowl in that manner. She is writing my future, too. No grandson of mine will go off fighting other people’s wars, no matter how noble it might be to fight for king and country. No grandson of mine will do anything that wastes their mind. They will find an occupation that keeps them safely in London. No grandson of mine will go uneducated.

These are the words that conjure Mister Cedric Rotard. Mister Rotard has the appearance of a spindle that has lost the best part of its wool. The strain of being a tutor has rubbed him threadbare ever since he left what he calls ‘my alma mater’, which he told me curtly is not his mother but something called a university, which he speaks of in a crushed voice, as though it really were his mother, and had loved him the way mothers are meant to do, but had unexpectedly turned on him and thrown him out on his bare arse-bones. I have the strongest feeling he would have stayed there had he been able, so he didn’t have to teach little toe rags (which I heard him call me to Adisa) their alphabets. After a year of Wednesdays, we are well beyond the alphabet, and he is trying to do what he calls extending my vocabulary, perhaps so that I can understand better what he is saying to me, because many of his words are a lot longer than the words I have been used to, and have their roots in Latin, which he also says he will teach me. I ask him where they speak Latin, and he says ‘Nowhere but where gentlemen mingle’ which he seems to think a very fine quality. I ask him if there are no countries where they speak Latin and he answers, ‘Not one,’ looking as pleased if Mrs Frederick the housekeeper has brought him a slice of her honey cake, and I say, then I won’t learn it, but might he please learn me French, and he says ‘will you’ and ‘teach me’ and ‘No’. He is confusing to me and confused himself, more often than is safe for someone somewhere as busy as London, and is more likely to remember a line of poetry from a man in a powdered wig than he is to remember where he is in a sentence, or where his spectacles are, or that a respectable man is required to tuck his shirt into his trousers.

He is fond of switching me with his rule whenever I fail to meet his measure of me. One time, when I am making an error, he swats the back of my hand so hard that I am surprised into the moment of his death. Crossing a road with his eyes concerned in a letter, he mis-steps on a wet cobble and all his long body collapses like a pile of soft fruit, under the iron-rimmed wheels of a dray cart. I see his pince-nez — the same set he peers through at me daily — crushed into bitter jewels on the cobbles, the purple snake of his blood, the half-read letter released from a stricken hand. Not so many years away, from his uncreased brow and his same-style jacket. Returning to the sunlit dust of the room, the pine desk, and my stinging hand paralysed on the paper, I hold my eyes to his very firmly, as though I can stick him to the present moment. A moment in which — I observe — he sighs a breath out of his nose and tsks his tongue against his teeth. His eyes grow aghast to be gazed upon.

‘What, boy?’

‘Never read out of doors,’ I say.

To which he says nothing, but turns and walks to the window, shivering across his shoulders.

Mister Rotard thinks very fondly of Mister Dryden, our national poet, and will quote him at the smallest provocation. The sight of a polished apple in a bowl on the dining table, for example, provokes him to stand very still, as though afraid to lose his balance, and then throw his arm towards the curtain as though it were about to draw back to reveal an audience, and recite a small verse. So compelling is his action that I look to the curtain for a hidden listener, but there is nothing there but a dead bumblebee lying below, which must have given up on the French windows ever being opened again because Mrs Read has been reading about the dangers of breathing in fog. It has been foggy for three days. But Mister Rotard cares not a fig about fog. Mister Rotard only cares about the mother university and Mister Dryden. I think Mister Dryden a horrible prig but cannot say so, for the certainty that it would lead Mister Rotard to cuff me round the ear. He is in the habit of cuffing me round the ear whenever he imagines I am not listening or have not heard him. Which is often, because rarely do I understand what he is saying when he recites poetry, and when I do understand, I do not like it. This is the verse which the apple prompted him to perform to the curtain:

‘A woman’s counsel brought us first to woe,

And made her man his paradise forego,

Where at heart’s ease he liv’d; and might have been

As free from sorrow as he was from sin.’

It is from a poem called ‘The Cock and the Fox’. He tells me Mister Dryden claims the words to be those of the cock Chanticleer, which is a fine trick when it gives licence to other cocks to crow them across English parlours. Mister Rotard has said this verse at me half a dozen times now, as if expecting me to agree heartily, because I am a young man, and therefore should imagine that women are to blame for everything. Whereas being a girl, and knowing what I know about my own making, and how that drove Ma to gin, and her husband to flee back to the sea, I might be inclined to throw some blame the other way. But wickedness does not reside only in one sex, and goodness does not choose its host by their reproductive organs. You schooled me early on that what the Church preaches to us is lies, and there to keep us bent low, scrubbing steps and hauling coal, or bowing and curtseying to their lord and ladyships. Eve’s ruin of Adam, for which womankind are punished forever with the curse of monthly pain and deathly childbearing, is one of the worst of those lies.

Mister Rotard likes to pronounce things about Man, and Man is meant to mean all of us, though clearly it only means men. Man has direction and purpose whereas woman has none, and not even a capital letter. Man must make things in the world — strides, his mark, waves — but woman can only make things in the house and only things of no consequence.

Yet the knowledge that Mister Rotard bestows upon me is a gift. The means by which I may sign my name, and read what I am signing it to, and read almost any book in Mrs Read’s dead husband’s study, is a gift usually given only to those with extra meat between the legs. The small bulge where my pizzle should be is only a balled up stocking. But with this simple trick and a face that might be either sex or none, I am now equipped to read what the world has to tell me.

Education takes up the whole of Wednesdays, but your grandfather’s library is mine on Sundays, so long as I have been well-behaved at the dinner table. Your grandfather was a merchant trader. His study is filled with the accounts of travellers and seafarers. And there are maps. I stare at them: the strange names, the inky outlines of shorelines. I feel for a sense of you in any of them: the quickening of knowledge, this old kind of knowledge that has always been mine without trying. I ask which bay, which island, which port contains you. But I cannot empty myself to receive the answer. It is only questions, more questions, a fury of questions, filling up my head like brine in drowning lungs.

Three summers go by. My thumb and two fingers are stained black at their tips, as though rotten with writing. When first I began my twice-weekly visits, Mrs Read was concerned that I was not tall enough. She said I must eat more chard, because ‘chard makes long bones’. So I ate more chard. Always chard on Sundays when she could get hold of it. After three years she is concerned I am too tall. Far too tall for my age, surely. No more chard, and less sunlight. She barters an extra day a week out of my mother. The country is fevered with talk of war and this worries her. Boys have such a tendency to be romantic about war, and what of their mothers and what of their grandmothers, and what of the poor dear girls who might have had husbands. I am not to imagine she will ever buy me a commission.

‘That is a thing that will not happen,’ she says. ‘There will be no more calamities.’

But no amount of money gives a person freedom from that.

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Impostors Run in the Family

London seems the finest place in the world. The road, having hardened, begins to clatter beneath the wheels, signalling that the great city has begun. From the top of the coach, where we sit as outsides (at half the price of insides) we can admire to my side a great park full of deer, and to Ma’s, handsome palaces set back from the road. All the noblemen and noblewomen have town dwellings as well as country ones, the coach driver explains, and they are gathered together here, each showing off with grand entrances and ornamental frontages how very favoured they are. Brother, you would laugh the scorn off your boot laces to see the nonsense they get up to with their lions on gateposts and their fancy curlicue railings. Then the deer park gives way to more fine houses, closer to the carriageway but still very grand and tall. From these first impressions, I imagine we are going to live in the highest manner. We turn into another fine road but soon it gives way, as high morals give way to corruption, to something of a meaner character, and soon I am convinced this is a devilish kind of place, somewhere so far from the sea that nothing fresh or fully alive can dwell in it. There are beggars by the side of the road with all kinds of hideous deformities, and elderly vegetables on the market stalls, and fish that have been dead for so long that they are blind and half-stinking. Though even their death-stink can hardly compete with the stench of human dung from open gutters. I see a woman hitch up her skirts and relieve herself in by the side of the road in broad daylight. Though she is wobbling, so might be drunk. Everybody seems to be drunk. It is only mid-afternoon as we are arriving, but I have never seen so many drunken people all in one place, and I very quickly surmise it is because one will need to be drunk all the time to live in a place as foul as London.

Then it grows finer again. Then more foul. Loud men and sharp women and grubby children, and gentlemen on horseback, and traders with their goods carts, and dray horses pulling beer in all directions, as though the place is made entirely of public houses. A man making music out of a contraption strung around his neck and another man juggling for money. Then clothes grow smarter and the buildings straighter, and huge domed cathedral rises out of the city’s stone heart. And all around it, trading and hawking and market stalls. This is a city that will not make up its mind, and I have no sense of where I might belong in it.

When we are finally disgorged from the coach, Ma tells me we are headed for Mrs Read’s house in Hatton Street. Mrs Read’s house is not like the houses I am used to, and I am not to touch anything, and I am not gawp at anything, and I am not to speak unless spoken to, and I am not to answer to any name except yours. Ma spittles my cheek with her handkerchief to unsmudge it, though her handkerchief is surely fouler than my face.

She pulls on the bell cord.

The door swings wide, answered by a negro servant wearing a dress coat and white gloves. He stares at us and I stare right back. Ma makes her spine stiff and explains she is Mrs Margret Read, come to see Mrs Ada Read about her grandson Mark. How she can call herself Mrs I do not know. I suppose it is in the same spirit that she is calling me Mark. Mrs is only for wealthy and respectable ladies and we both know she is a Goodwife if she is anything, and in truth not even that. The negro allows us in and tells us to wait in the hall, which is a room bigger than our whole downstairs room and with its own fireplace too. I marvel at the walls, which are made of carved wooden panels. It is not quite as grand as Lady Upton’s house, but I find it hard to believe that our mother married a man of such class and means. Our mother bends down towards my ear and whispers with considerable force,

‘This is a fine house, Mark, is it not? Your father grew up here.’

She has been preparing for days, but for me, it is very itchy to wear your name. Before I can object that no one is listening, the servant returns to usher us into the parlour.

Mrs Read is a tiny bird lady sitting on a velvet seat in a nest of cushions. Every cushion is embroidered with a flower, either purple or orange. The kind that grew in the vicarage garden, crocuses. Because of the cushions, her feet are not touching the floor, and sway a little as though blown by the breeze coming in at the window. A fierce face, and though this is your grandmother, I recognise nothing of you in it. There is much more of you in the handsome fellow painted in his waistcoat who hangs above the mantlepiece. Mrs Read purses her lips together as if she has nothing to say to us, but she sees that our mother is about to speak and determines to be first. Her voice seems to come from very far away, as though it is the voice of a person she has swallowed.

‘Margret. What a surprise to see you. You might have sent a message.’

Ma cannot write, as Mrs Read must surely know.

‘It has been a long time,’ our mother agrees.

‘Many years,’ says Mrs Read. ‘Many years. And this is young Mark? The last time I saw him, he was only a babe in arms.’

‘This is he,’ says Ma.

‘Let me look at you boy,’ says Mrs Read, and beckons me towards her until, seeing my shoes about to reach the colourful carpet in front of her, cries ‘Stop! Never on the Turkish. We go round. Stay there. I can see you well enough.’

From the twitch in her nostrils, I think she can smell me, too. She leans back a little.

‘He’s a sorry state, Margret, if you don’t mind me saying.’

‘It has been a long time since your son sent any money,’ Ma says.

‘It has been a long time since he sent anyone anything,’ says Mrs Read.

Ma nods. If they thought him drowned, neither woman will say it. As I later discover, their tight lips on this matter conceal quite different conclusions. Ma thinks everyone dead at the smallest opportunity. But Mrs Read will not believe the sea has swallowed her son until it coughs up bones.

‘As a consequence,’ says Ma, trying to pick her way past the silence, ‘we have fallen on hard times.’

‘Clearly,’ says Mrs Read. ‘And now you have come to see if I might soften those times, is that it?’

Ma casts her eyes down to the floor. ‘Not for me,’ she says. ‘But for your grandson. For the boy.’

Mrs Read tinkles a little bell that is sitting on the circular table at her elbow, and the negro servant appears.

‘Charles,’ she said, ‘would you bring us some tea? And some lemonade for the boy? Do sit down,’ she says to our mother, pointing towards a nervy-looking chair. And to me, ‘You’d better stand.’ I must be grubbier than I imagined. ‘Have you ever tasted lemonade?’ she asks me.

‘No, Ma’am,’ I answer, and she seems pleased to be addressed so. It came out of my mouth without thinking, because of how she reminds me of Lady Upton: her chest puffed up, and lace upon it, and servants to do her bidding.

‘It’s quite the sensation in London now,’ she says. ‘Made of lemons and sugar. You’ve had sugar?’

‘Yes, once.’ Only remembering as I say it that I stole a dab of it at the big house. But Ma is already speaking over me.

‘We’ve not had many luxuries since my husband went to sea. Mark was only a baby then.’

There is a glare in our mother, as though it is Mrs Read’s fault that he went to sea, and not her fault at all for marrying a sea captain, who would likely do such a thing. She carries on, her arm towards me as though she is a market trader come to sell a troublesome colt.

‘He is ever so thin, as you see, but he is a good boy, and he does not deserve to suffer when there is —’ she gazes mock-absently about the room, its drapes and hangings, its not-to-be-trodden-on carpet, its painting over the mantelpiece — ‘when there is the means to mend it.’

Mrs Read looks as though she is going to puff her feathers up, but then some thought deflates her, and she becomes tinier again. It is me she is looking at. Perhaps she imagines she sees something of her son in me, though there is not so much as the smallest scrap of Captain Read in my body.

‘It’s true,’ she says, ‘that my son would not want to see his own flesh and blood in such a sorry state. I can offer —’

Charles returns with a tray of tea things: an ornate silver pot, two bone china cups on saucers, a tiny sieve sitting on a tiny bowl, and a cloudy glass of what can only be my lemonade. With his precise white-gloved hands, Charles sets the tea things on the round table, next to the bell. He balances the tiny sieve over a cup, and pours the tea through it, catching a miniature slurry of dead leaves. A splash of tea hits his gloved fingers, and I wonder if he wears the gloves to protect his hands from tea, or to protect the tea from his hands. I feel sure he would not wear gloves at all, except that Mrs Read makes him. When he has gone, she stirs one lump of sugar into her tea, and continues where she left off.

‘I can offer to take the child in.’

I take a sip of the lemonade. It is nice and nasty all at once.

‘That is very kind of you,’ says to Ma, ‘but I could not be without the child.’ She puts several lumps of sugar into her cup, and from Mrs Read’s face, more than I believe is polite. Mrs Read speaks as if our mother hasn’t.

‘I will look after him and raise him as my own. Breed him up to be of good standing. He will want for nothing.’

This sounds good to me. Knowing how Ma despises me, I cannot think that she would say no.

‘No,’ she says. ‘It would break my heart to part with the child.’ I think this very well done. Her cup almost trembles on its saucer.

Mrs Read considers her. Considers me.

‘You would be welcome to visit him from time to time.’

‘Excuse me for appearing ungracious,’ our mother replies, seeming anything but. ‘The child is all I have left of my husband.’

Mrs Read to consider this statement, with spaces between those sips. Eventually she says,

‘You might visit him once a week. Would that be tolerable to you?’

‘It would be tolerable to me,’ I say, and Ma glares at me before turning to the older woman.

‘Mrs Read, we are speaking of my only child.’

‘And my only grandchild. I would like to be better acquainted.’

‘I might bring the child to you once a week.’

Negotiations continue in this manner for long enough for the tea to be drunk to its dregs. It is finally agreed that Mrs Read will provide a crown a week for my maintenance, and in return I will be brought to her every Wednesday, to be educated, and every Sunday to have dinner with her, Ma not to be present at either occasion. Our mother is given a crown in her hand as down-payment. We leave under a veil of politeness and gentility until the door is closed and we are halfway down the street and Ma cuffs me round the head.

‘I told you not to speak. You nearly cost me thirteen pounds a year! “It would be tolerable to me.” And I suppose you want me to starve while you live like a gentleman! Not that it would last long. The old woman is a fool, but not a complete fool. How long do you think you could deceive her, living under her roof? She would find you out, and then we would both be derelict!’

In the days that follow she says nothing more about the deception. We take lodgings not far from Mary-Bone. She refers to me as Mark and he and him in company, and Mark when we’re alone. The best lies, she says, are like the best dogs: kept both inside and out. Never again do I hear my name from her mouth.

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A Gentleman is Not Necessarily

We are walking to London. The shirt money buys food to save on lodgings, with the weather still fine, we sleep by the roadside. Ma says this is not shameful. Many good people fall on hard times and must do the same on their way to a new life. On the road we meet people our mother calls itinerants. An Irish tinker, who won’t stop talking to us, because when Ma pretends she is deaf, he turns to me, saying things that make our mother wince. A man with a travelling puppet show, which he has been wheeling about on a handcart. When we see him there is no show, unless we are meant to give a farthing to watch him sitting under a tree and crying. Many itinerants are men back from the wars, with their uniforms worn through, and missing pieces of their bodies. Ma says don’t look at them, the itinerants, we don’t want to mix with the likes of them. Doesn’t sleeping in the ditches make us itinerants too? Ma says no, we are honest travellers, a different thing entirely. Pressed further: because we have somewhere to go. Where? Never you mind, she says, you are always full of questions, and questions get a person into trouble. So I shut my mouth, thinking that I am a person today, and glad of that.

In Exeter, Ma diverts us to the river, where she dips her handkerchief into the water and scrubs at her face until it comes up pink and the handkerchief grey. She rinses it in the Exe and then dabs and scrubs at the tell-tale places on her dress, a dress that says here and there it has spent two nights kissing ditches.

She lets that dress dry, with her in it, on Cathedral Green. The Cathedral sits very wide at its front, like a broody hen hatching something under the earth. From the side it looks like a whole lot of smaller churches all squeezed together. The grass around it is well trimmed by sheep but the verger or someone has cleared up their doings. We don’t say much. Ma doesn’t want grass stains on her skirts, so she walks about. But the grass won’t make a stain on your old moleskin trousers, which were made to be the colour of dirt. So I lie back on the grass letting the sun soak into me, like our afternoons on Guzzle Down or at Great Wishings, when the whole sky would sail over us and you’d talk about adventures you’d have, when you were old enough.

When the light fades, we go to an inn with a picture of a white hart, and Ma tells me to wait outside. Swifts are screeching around the eaves, and there’s still heat in the air, and the smell of dinner, which makes me hungry. We had pasties on the Cathedral Green, from a woman who came out of her house with a basket, and Ma wrapped four for the journey, but they are with her and not me. And I am not journeying. The stars come peeping out, and one or two coaches clatter over the cobbles into the courtyard, empty themselves of people and baggage, shed their horses into the stables, and still I wait. Crouch down with my back against the wall, listening to the laughter inside as the ale grows it. Think of that night. I see you put the note in his hand and I see myself running in and snatching it out again, no harm done, and the Dutch sailors laughing at these silly littluns playing a game they don’t understand, a game that would have kept you in Fishtown, with both your shoes, and Mister Lampard with our mother, and me in the straw bed in the eaves next to you, where I would give anything to be.

Ma is gone for so long that I wonder if she has slipped away without me seeing. People come out, laughing and half-falling on the cobbles. The moon has risen until it is high over the Cathedral, silvering the roofs of the houses. Clunker-clunk, the inn door bolted from the inside. I go and relieve myself behind the stables. Then return to my spot, lay my hands down on the cobbles, and my head down on my hands, and pretend that your arms are around me.

I am shaken awake. Two bare feet. Ma’s feet. She straightens herself to standing, clutching a blanket around her shoulders. Underneath, the creamy shock of undergarments. She motions me up.

My bones are so chilled that it’s hard to move, but I follow to the back of the inn, clumsy on my not-woken legs. She signals quiet, then opens the door. A servants’ passage, a narrow staircase. No candle, but I can make out the stairs from the light that leaks through an upstairs window. She creeps along the passageway with me as her shadow. She stops at the third door.

‘Get under the bed,’ she whispers. ‘I’ve put a blanket there. Don’t make a sound and don’t come out until I tell you.’

She opens the door. The bedchamber is flooded with moonlight. The bed is entirely unmade and something — someone — is snoring there. An invisible gentleman is draped over the corner chair: breeches, shirt, waistcoat, hat. Nothing but clothes without any gentleman to puff them up, and her dress beside those things, and a tall pair of riding boots standing by the chair like a soldier on duty. She points me towards the dark space under the bed. I slide under, quiet as I can be. There’s the creak of her getting into the bed above me. So the gentleman has let her share his bed, but there is no room for me. Or it would not be right for me to share with him too. Or he does not know about me. Whatever the truth may be, the only truth that matters to me is that I am not abandoned, and the hard floor is better than the hard ground, and the air inside the inn is warmer than the air without, and I have a blanket to boot, which is not only beneath me but wrapped around me.

For the first few minutes of the morning, there is a great to-do. The whole bed is creaking and squeaking, as though Ma and the gentleman can’t get comfortable, and are wrestling with each other. I think they must be about to get out of bed, but neither Ma’s feet nor the gentleman’s feet land on the floor, and I wonder that they are having such difficulty getting up, except that this is one of the best rooms of the inn, and the mattress is probably filled with feathers, like Lady Upton’s at the big house, and maybe too squashy to make getting out of it very easy. But at last the commotion subsides, with the gentleman crying out like he has hurt himself, and I hear Ma making shushing noises, meaning maybe he has, and then all is quiet again. I am aching to relieve myself, and the chamber pot is right next to my face, but can’t be used without me getting out from underneath. One of them used it in the night, and it is a poor stench for my nose to have for breakfast, but I am determined to be good after being left outside for so long.

Then the gentleman is snoring again. Blessedly, a pair of feet appear — Ma’s — and she makes the smallest of rustles as she gathers up her clothes. She signals me out to the open door and we are away down the stairs. In the rear courtyard she pulls on the rest of her clothes and I help her with her stays and ties. We use the jakes before we leave the premises. We’re walking very fast, faster than usual, getting ourselves back on the road to London. The light is cold and grey, the sun only just coming up.

She says, ‘If we get ourselves to the Black Swan by half past the hour, we can ride the stagecoach to London.’ Seeing my confusion, she reaches into her purse and shows me three golden sovereigns before dropping them back inside.

‘You got them from the gentleman?’ I ask, though I can think of no other place where a woman like our mother would get anything gold.

‘He had plenty,’ she says. ‘We can ride for a hundred miles with one of these. Two of them will get us to London. Come on!’

She picks up her heels, and I do the same.

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A Girl’s Job is Not to be Noticed

High summer. Disappointed bees in the pantry, swifts tumbling from the eaves.

Ma’s fingers have stopped working. Ma says it is her eyes. She must make three new shirts for Reverend Ashburner, and one for John Clowter, but they will only be made if shirts are made out of curses. Her stitches have grown large as insect legs, and she cannot thread the needle. She asks me, and when he is about, Mister Lampard, ‘Thread the needle please love, I can’t seem to. These new needles. Why would they make them with such small eyes?’ Her fingers tremble like spring leaves. When I come close to thread the needle, her breath is sour with what she calls her pick-me-up. Mister Lampard comes to supper less and less. Sometimes there is no supper at all. When there is, it tends to the measly and mean. Hard bread that next-door brings over when they have baked fresh. Grey soup. No one mentions you. Your name is worse than a curse word in this house. Say it and get a thick ear. No one need say it though, when it’s everywhere. In her tremble, in her shouting, in her eyes that can’t look into the needle’s eye, or mine. She is fills the hole you left with gin.

Mister Lampard is not the same. His presence feels like something you don’t want to put any weight on, a stone in your shoe. He still holds Ma when she’s crying. One time, afterwards, he comes to me outside on the step where I’m sitting.

‘Tyke,’ he says, ‘you need to pick up your Ma’s sewing.’

I look around me, but can’t see where she’s left it.

‘You need to finish those shirts,’ he says, ‘if you’re to have any food at all next week.’

I look at his face, to see if there’s a trick hidden there. But his brow is heavy as a spade that’s about to bury someone. Seeing he is serious, I spit out what he must surely know.

‘Sewing is for girls.’

‘Tyke —’

‘For girls,’ I repeat. But the look on him is troubling. Though we’re alike as two peas, and I’ve never pulled on a pair of breeches that wasn’t first yours, and though Ma never made any difference between us except liking you not me, there was one thing that marked us apart.

‘Must I be a girl now, I ask?’

‘You don’t have to change a thing about yourself,’ he says, and before I can rise to protest he adds, ‘only do the sewing. You can thread a needle, your hands are small, and it’s fine work.’

‘Women’s work. I’m not a woman.’

‘You’ll be a woman soon enough,’ he says. ‘A good woman too if you are anything like your Ma. Now go inside,’ he says, ‘and say to your mother you would like to help.’

Lie to her, he is saying. Again, I know not to speak, because no grown up likes to be told they’re wrong. And he is wrong, I am nothing like our Ma. But I go in and lie to our mother, committing myself to a prison of needle and thread. A life spent in the freedom of anthills and dew ponds is captured and bridled, forced inside to the gloom.

Sewing is a tedious business. It must be done indoors because outdoors is dusty, even though that’s where the light is. She will not have me dragging the cuffs on the step. I must make my stitches near invisible, small as the threads of the fabric itself, as though it is held together by desire. Women have fashioned themselves like sewing, too. So-called good women, like good stitching, make themselves small enough to be invisible, with not a scrap of rough seam to be shown, every cut turned in on itself and hemmed, like the tight lips of the church wives, hem, hem, hem. Visible women are said to be whores.

Sometimes when I am sewing I make myself so small that the needle is a tiny sword. A slender epee like the French use, which we saw in a duel once on the harbourside, flashing through the air until the French sailor’s opponent was cut so badly that his sleeve turned completely red. Women ran for their needles to sew his arm skin back together, because the man would not have survived a day’s ride to the doctor. And Sarah Foxwill said, ‘What a fuss these men make!’ but I could see she liked it. Something more than the flashing of swords in sunlight glittered in her eye.

I don’t like what the needle does to the ends of my fingers. A thimble protects my left thumb from being sewn into the fingers holding the needle, which rely on the feeling of flesh, get sore and put-upon. Nor do I like the quiet sit-stillness of the seamstress, the eye for only one thing, and that thing the smallest detail that no one will notice. Indeed, if your work is noticed, you have failed. This is women’s work, to make things no one notices. Or things that vanish into people’s mouths so there is nothing to show for it tomorrow, and to do the same chore over and over again, only to have it undone the same day by somebody else. Whereas a man might build a chair or a house or ship: something that might be of use for a lifetime or more.

Our mother pretends she made the shirts herself. She delivers them personally to John Clowter, and to the Reverend Ashburner’s housekeeper Mrs Weevill. She comes back to the cottage with some new calico and a wrapper of chops. She even gives me a little ale at supper, but it makes my mouth sour. Mister Lampard sits across the table looking as though he has already moved away.

Because this is the summer he moves away. He tells her one night after I’m sent to bed. She says,

‘Please don’t leave. Hywel. Hywel.’ And even his name in her mouth is saying ‘You Will, You Will.’

What follows Mister Lampard’s leaving does not deserve too many words. I tell her I won’t be sewing any more shirts. She knocks me to the hearth with the kettle.

When I wake up, some strange calm has come over her.

‘You’re the spit of your brother,’ she says. ‘The spit.’

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The Truth is Mostly Invented

They have laid me out on the table. The back of my head sits on a pad of cloth like an egg in a nest. Mister Lampard’s egg from his sailing days, big as my head, painted with negroes, that a whole grown henny could fit in. From an ostrich, which he told me was a bird a tall as a person with a bald pate and wings made out of hat feathers. He sold the egg when I was seven to buy Ma a new dress for holy days, saying she is a fine woman who deserves fine clothes. The dress was pretty enough, but she got blood on the back of it and didn’t say how, and though it laundered out mostly there remained a stain like the map of a far-away island. My head on the pad of cloth feels as hollow as that ostrich egg.

Pulled all the way up to my neck is a scratchy blanket. From the gin-sick smell of it, the blanket from Ma’s bed. I am listening with my eyes closed. I have surfaced from a ringing, thump-headed silence into scraps of talking that make no sense. Ma sobbing somewhere, and close to me, Mister Lampard’s voice, whispery. Neighbours, too, hushed as though talking in church when they shouldn’t. Sarah Foxwill and Sarah Moxy. Where are you? Arrested maybe, for clonking my father into the drink. Ma’s sobbing rises and falls like a November wind, and I don’t like that it stinks of something lost. The only words I can make out are Mister Lampard’s, because the Sarahs are practiced at talking under their breath, and the only sound they make is a soft sea-shushing. Mister Lampard’s whisper can no more hide itself than a cow can.

‘No,’ he is saying, ‘not that I know.’

‘The little one was out cold.’

‘Maybe. But it weighed anchor this morning.’

‘No, not a sign of him. Margret is fearing the worst.’

The words land on me like rain. Their cold meaning soaks into me. Moving makes my head punch itself from the inside. Your name comes out of me in a rush, with other words that unravel. Mister Lampard leaps to catch me — ‘Stop, little one!’ — and lays me back down, very gentle with my head in particular.

‘Shush now,’ he says, stroking my hair, ‘nothing to be vexing you,’ but his eyes say otherwise.

‘Mark,’ I say. Feeble as a snail.

‘Was Mark with you in the sail yard?’

The yes comes out of me like thin soup, no heft to it at all.

‘What happened?’

My thoughts crawl back. Ringing darkness. Before that? Splash in the water. Before that? You run across the stars with a giant hook in your hands. Before? Crack to the back of the head. Before? My father’s huge maw, grinning. My own eyes staring at me out of his face. My ankle tight in the manacle of his fist. And the two steps I took towards him. Had I stayed put —

I try to shake my head but even the smallest of side-to-side movements hurts like a fresh beating.

‘No?’ he says. ‘You can’t remember?’

And I so want that to be the truth. A person so stupid as to take those two steps towards a brute hanging for his life over the harbour wall deserves to have their head smashed open, and the brains spill out, and never to breathe again. But what has happened to you?

‘It’s all my fault!’

And Mister Lampard says, ‘No, Tyke, No, whatever you done, it was an accident.’

But now Ma comes roaring in, her face so close I can smell the drink in her.

‘Where’s Mark got to? What you done to my boy?’ Shaking my shoulders like I’m cream and she’s making butter. No word dares come out in the face of her fierceness. Which only makes her rage more, until I say,

‘Nothing! I done nothing!’

‘Nothing?’ she says. ‘You done something. It’s all your fault, you said, I heard you!’

Harder and harder, the shaking.

‘I done nothing!’

What you done to your brother?’ Her voice is a needle.

Then something happens in my head. One minute it’s so full of hurt I think it will explode like gorse pods. Next minute I can see her shaking that body on the table but I’m not inside it anymore. Her face, rosy as an apple, and that tight little mouth spitting words. When she says your name, I feel you on the other side of it, still attached to it, like an animal at the end of a long, long tether. You’re in the dark somewhere.

Ma is still blazing but Mister Lampard has her by her shoulders.

‘Leave it off, Margret, poor mite’s had such a knock, you’ll have no children left.’ He tears her off and lays me back down gently. She stands there, arms at her sides shaking uselessly with nothing to hold between them. When my body’s laid down he turns to her and she crumples to the floor, sobbing. If Mister Lampard didn’t stop her, I think she would have shaken me to death. When I fall back into my body, it has fallen, itself, into a long sleep.

When I wake again I am in my own bed. It is half dark, and I cannot tell if that means morning or night. There is talk downstairs, low and halting, and every now and then the sound of a spoon on a platter, which makes me think it must be supper-time - the end of the day, not the beginning. At first I don’t know why I’m in bed at supper-time, and think maybe we’ve been bad. I put my arm out to flop across your body to wake you and ask you. Cold blanket. Strange feeling in my head. Sore lump at the back of it. I remember.

When they know I’m awake, the questions begin. Mister Lampard in charge so Ma doesn’t get into a rage. He calls me to the downstairs room. Stands me in front of him. Ma holds herself at the door, looking out onto the street and vibrating. Very gently he says,

‘What was your fault, Tyke?’

I can’t say about our murder plan, following you down to the dockside, moving when I should have been still.

‘Being born!’ says our mother from the doorway,

‘What were you two doing?’ says Mister Lampard, ignoring her. ‘Why did you go out in the middle of the night?’

How can I say?

‘It was a game,’ I say.

‘What game?’ says Ma. ‘What game? What game?’

There’s no name for this game. Nothing comes. Mister Lampard tries again.

‘What happened to Mark?’

This is the question I want to ask them. If they’re asking me, then you’re lost. Mister Lampard, waiting for an answer, begins to blur.

‘I don’t know.’

‘That’s a lie!’ says Ma. ‘Look at those eyes.’

‘How did you hurt your head?’

Hand on my ankle, tug. The truth is impossible.

‘I fell over.’

‘Did Mark fall over?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was anyone else there?’

My father hangs off the side of memory, eyes like my eyes, burning into me, telling me to tell the truth. I shake him off. Say, again, again, like another lump of moss on the path,

‘I don’t know.’

Mister Lampard turns to our mother and says,

‘Margret, we’re getting nowhere.’

Afterwards, she only wants rid of me. She doesn’t want to see me, she says, stay out of her way. Under the covers, the air grows hot. Tears run into my mouth. Later, I take myself down to the harbour. Stare at the fishing boats all tucked up for the day. Go along the side of the dyeing shed, scouting for clues. Nothing at all. No big hook. I stare down into the water for a long time, but its surface fidgets and the depth is stirred up like clouds. The rest of the harbour glints back at me with a sea kind of knowing.

The sea takes things away and brings things back, and sometimes what wasn’t there when you looked before floats in on a friendly tide, or the sunk thing fills with air and rises, or the drowned thing rafts, or the lost thing flops back onto the beach it was stolen from, days ago, weeks ago. Those next days and weeks, I walk along the foreshore looking for any little piece of you. But always there’s nothing, and I go back home through the alleys with my eyes on the ground, hoping no one will speak to me. Once or twice I look up by mistake and catch somebody startling when they see me, thinking I’m you. I never had a scrap of clothing that wasn’t yours. And I see their disappointment, too, when they see it’s only me. I wish I was you, too, so I wouldn’t have to look at Ma looking at me with that wish in her eyes.

Ma sleeps as much as she can. Every night someone from the village comes in to see how she is, and brings something for supper. They stay and talk to Mister Lampard. He is guarding Ma like a pie that needs cooling off, too hot to be cut up and served, though everyone wants a portion of her. I am always sent up right after we’ve eaten so they can speak their minds. I listen through the boards. Have I remembered? Am I maybe too scared to say? Sarah Foxwill says maybe you slipped into the harbour and drowned, but your body got tangled up in the rope when the Dutch ship weighed anchor. Got snagged and dragged out to sea. Will we have a service? Prayers have been said for two Sundays now but if the body has been dragged out to sea, never to return, then a service —

Dragged out to sea. Young men are snatched away to sea all the time in the big cities. When the Dutch ship sailed, might you have sailed with it? Taken by my father for punishment, or for revenge?

I ask Mister Lampard where it was going and he says the West or East Indies. He’s been to the East Indies. Furnace hot, he says. Months away. Markets full of foods that don’t look edible. Bright-coloured birds, reds, yellows and greens. I tell him I think you might have been taken onto the ship. My words vanish like the kind of snow that won’t settle. He puts his meaty hand on my shoulder and says,

‘We all want Mark to be alive, Tyke.’

Ma’s taken to her bed like crying’s a sickness. She’s sure you are drowned. I say nothing to her, for fear of her smacking me to Kingdom Come.

Then your shoe appears. Mercy Hindwish finds it, washed up on the beach, soggy, already growing green fronds like the fishing boats do. Ma knows, and I know, that it is your shoe, but neither will say so. Mister Lampard knows it is your shoe and your death becomes as real to him as the stone step at our door. The whole of Fishtown starts chattering. Where would the boy go with only one shoe? They are waiting for you to wash up on the shore any day now. Not knowing you’re on the way to a land where it’s summer forever and the birds are too bright to hide.

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Gin is Nobody’s Friend for Long

Bedtime comes fast when Ma hits the gin. Not for her sending us. We send ourselves. First thing, she gets friendly, all ‘cm-ere’, all ‘av-a-cuddle’. She wants to croon to us, especially the baby songs, the ones we don’t remember though she says they were our favourites. For maybe an hour she is the ma she might have been before she got hurt and hard from being, as she says, ‘the widow of a living man’. But even though gin opens her heart and makes her loving for a time, what else is stored behind that loving is not worth staying for, and we don’t tarry on her lap. We squirm off, and duck the loosely curling arm that tries to catch us as we pass, to clear the table and do our chores as fast as a couple of ants. You start the yawning, I catch it like the measles, and we find ten ways of saying how very tired we are before taking ourselves off to bed. Once she starts drinking, the past will come winding out of her, and before too long she’ll tip over the point where she loves her darlings and find the point where she hates our fathers: yours for going to sea, and mine for visiting land. And we are the only bits of them she can hit with her tongue or her clog.

We’re up in the rafters by the time the blazing starts and when splinters of the words come through the floorboards and spear me, you put your arms around me and say,

‘She don’t mean nothing. Don’t listen, Tyke.’

Then after a time she goes quiet, which is gin’s final blessing, the honey after the sting. You slide out of bed and stand there listening. Fully dressed, because you had no thought of going to sleep. The Dutch ship weighs anchor tomorrow, and you’ve a man to send to his judgement.

‘She’s snoring,’ you say. ‘Go to sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘Wait,’ I say, and something sits me up like a jack-in-a-box. Even though I’m scared to see a murder, I’m more scared to wait for you, not knowing the where and the what and the how, and afraid you might not come back at all. Suddenly it seems worse to be left not knowing than to know more things than a child should see and know, even if that means I must help you to murder.

‘Well, hurry up and put your scrags on,’ you say. Who knows what time he’ll be too drunk to care?

A tiptoed creep across the parlour and a gentle click of the door and a run-and-duck through the streets and we’re crouched at the back door of the Blue Anchor. A man so tattooed he looks bruised stumbles out to the jakes, putting his hand out to the doorpost to steady himself. He turns to shout something to his friends, and though I don’t know the words, they sound like what you called Dutch. Still crouched, you peer round the door.

‘Is my father in there?’ ‘Must be,’ you say. ‘Though I can’t see him. You have a look.’

We change over. A fog of tobacco smoke. There are not enough stools and two men are leaning on the table. Another is sitting drunkenly in another man’s lap and they’re laughing like donkeys. One is on the floor, his two hands in prayer making a pillow for his head, eyes closed, peaceful as a babe. All of them at the table are a-ragging and a-roaring in their own language, the same as all seafaring men will do with a whole lot of rum inside them. Mister Lampard says they’re so used to being unsteady at sea they must make themselves unsteady on land too. Then I see him, the man said to be my father. Lifting a tankard, the forearm with its five-bar gate.

‘He’s in there,’ I say. ‘The one with his foot on the sleeping man.’

You check again.

‘Good,’ you say. You pull out the note tucked in your shirt, smooth out the creases. I already know what it says. You read it to me that afternoon. It says ‘I have been watching you from afar. Would you spend the night with a lonely young woman before you go to sea? Follow the boy, he will lead you to where I am waiting. Emerald.’

‘Who is Emerald?’ I asked and you said, ‘It is a whore’s name I think.’

You peer in again and I peer with you. John Crappin is standing by them now. He has brought them another large jug of ale, and two bottles of I know not what. He is collecting their coins. Silver is good, no matter whose head is on the shilling.

‘Now?’ I ask.

‘Not with John Crappin there. He mustn’t see me.’

So we wait and we wait, and duck out of the way behind barrels when anyone comes out to use the jakes. We are small enought to be hidden in the dark.

Then the moment comes and you are gone so quickly that it makes me jump when you are back again.

‘He has the note,’ you say. ‘Once we’re gone, follow after us. But don’t get too close. And don’t let anyone see you.’

You hop off down the path and wait there in the darkness. Just the line of your shoulders lit by the moon. I peer round the doorway. My father, and the man next to him, stare into the note like it is a well. Can they read? I remember your mime and wonder whether you did it already. My father screws up the note and bounces it off the head of the sleeping man. I look to you at the gate, but I know I shouldn’t raise my voice. So I tiptoe down the path and whisper,

‘He screwed it up and threw it on the floor.’

‘Blow!’ you say. You go back up the path, I follow like a lamb, and we both of us crouch back down by the barrels. But even as we stop there we can see the sleeping man, no longer asleep, has picked it up and is uncrumpling it. He starts reading aloud in broken English.

‘I have been watching you from afar.’

There is chuckling at the table. Some of them must know English. My father’s brow crunches. He doesn’t know why they are laughing. Someone tells him the joke he is missing. The woken man is laughing so much he can no longer speak and my father snatches the note out of his hand, half tearing it. Then, staring at it, he seems to remember he cannot read, and offers it back, prodding him to read more, and someone else to translate. When the woken man gets to ‘Emerald’, my father leaps out of his chair and bellows ‘Emerald! Emerald!’ and something I don’t understand but can guess means ‘I’m coming!’ because he is clutching his hand to his heart like it is so painfully full of love and that it might burst if he doesn’t contain it, and the whole table roars with laughter. Only then do we realise that he is about to burst out into the night, and you are not in your position by the gate.

We are saved by my father wheeling on his heel by the door to perform an elaborate and wobbly bow to his shipmates. By the time he has unfolded himself and turned himself in our direction you are once again a shadow standing at the gate. He locates you in the darkness, managing the English word ‘Boy?’ before stumbling past, blind to anything but the beacon that will lead him to a woman. His bulk blots you out of my sight for a moment. Then you are a shadow running down to the harbour, and he is stumbling after you.

I am a second shadow, flickering along behind the both of you. His journey is made difficult by the booze. As we approach the waterfront, he is laughing and calling for you to slow down, and the moonlight gleams wickedly on the sea. You’re heading for the yard where the sailcloth is boiled with tar, tallow and ochre until it is a baked crab red. Then winding along the narrow side of the shed. I’m only steps behind my father now. He is snorting through his nose like a bull. He shimmies the bulk of him down the same narrow passage by the side of the dyeing shed, the water twinkling below like a thing waiting to be fed. And as he rounds the corner of it, you do as you said you would: a rope secured to a mooring loop under the harbour wall pulls tight across his path at ankle height, and he trips.

But not quite into the water. With the instincts of a sailor whose body is practised at holding him out of the waves, he has grabbed hold of the rope.

The oaths that come out of him in a flurry of Dutch, I am glad not to know. His body, heavy from sinning and sodden with booze, is dangling over the water. Can he swim? He calls to you — ‘Boy! Boy!’ — and you step out from the darkness warily. ‘Boy!’ he says again. His hands grip the rope. He jerks his head to the side in a motion that asks you to come to his aid. Is he too drunk to know that the rope was pulled tight by your own hands? You stand unmoving.

‘Boy!’ he says, angrily now, and then something in Dutch that cannot be good, with a kick of the tongue and a dark trapdoor at the end of it. Perplexed, you glance at me, and his head swivels round. You have given me away. A grin spreads over his face like ants on bread.

‘Ha!’ he says. ‘Svay!’ And seeing confusion cloud my face, ‘Two!’ He turns his attention to me now, cranking his head to the side. ‘Come!’ he says thickly.

I hesitate. His eyes are twinkling like the water behind him, dark and mischievous. I have seen those eyes in the backs of spoons. Does he see this too, our family likeness? Is that why he is beckoning me towards him? The father who wishes to get a closer look at his child? His smile is unfathomable. I take two steps towards him and you shout ‘Stay where you are!’ but too late: a hand clamps round my ankle.

‘Run, Tyke!’ you say, and I try to pull away, but cannot free myself. You stare, wide-eyed. Now my father grins more fiercely. His eyes darken. He is stronger than he seemed, hanging on the rope with only one hand, and me with the other, but he cannot heft himself back onto solid ground without releasing me. I look into your face, and it is white as if it had seen Millicent Peeler’s ghost. But before I can so much as take another breath you have stepped back, vanishing into the darkness.

‘Mark!’ I cry, and your name echoes back off the cliffs. My father jerks my foot towards him and I crash onto my tailbone and then, as he jerks again, I’m flat bang on the back of my head — a flash of lightning, a sharp pain. I’m staring up the sky and the sky is staring back at me with its millions of eyes, and I can see deep, deep into that forest of nothing at all. Though he’s let go of my foot, though he’s grunting and hauling himself up, there is a buzzing in my ears, louder and louder, and I can’t lift my head, I can’t speak. You roar out of the darkness, blurring through my vision with a huge iron hook in your hands, and the last thing I hear is a splash.

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The Gift May Be the Wrapping

Saturday wakes me up with the sound of carts taking fish to market. Up past the Cowtown toll they meet other carts carrying all God’s living things, and dead ones too. Turkeys and chickens, turnips and onions, mackerels and cockles: anything you can kill and put in a pot is going off to get sold so that someone can eat it. I shove your shoulder a couple of times but you’re worn out from scouting so I’m first down to breakfast, except there isn’t any, because of Ma’s fright at the harbour. Ma sends me to Clowter’s for brisket. I hate John Clowter’s and she knows, but she never minds how I feel about anything. All those dead animal bodies hanging from Clowter’s ceiling, the rabbits stretched out like they were leaping away before they got bloody, the half pigs showing the side of their ribs no-one was meant to see, the chickens all naked and their white fishy eyes staring pure deadness, right into my heart like its own winter. I start upstairs to wake you, but she snatches my wrist, tells me to leave you sleeping.

There’s nothing for it but to clatter down the steps to the harbour. Grace Foxwill’s da is sitting on his steps mending a net and says, ‘Watch yer feet, Tyke,’ as I go by. There’s two more ships stocking up in the harbour beside my father’s, and some fishing boats too, and gulls are making a racket around somebody throwing out fish guts. I don’t look up at the deck of the Dutch ship. It’s moored there like a hill of trouble, but my eyes don’t need to climb it. I go past like I’m being whistled somewhere, half running.

John Clowter is blowing smoke outside his shop, with the big pipe he got from a whaler. For a minute I think this saves me from looking at all the dead things but the minute he sees me he says, ‘Ah, young Mark,’ knocks out his pipe and steps back into his shop, like I should follow. I don’t tell him he’s wrong on the name. I am wearing your last year’s breeches and maybe his eyes are not so good. And maybe wearing your name I can be braver, not shivered up my spine by the beasts and half-beasts dangling in the window. In he goes, and I go after.

There’s a shuffle at the back of the shop, and Peter Moxy vanishes like a wish. You remember one time we were playing Spit-Split with Peter in Tinkers Wood and he took an eyeball from his pocket and popped it into his mouth? Deep brown stare-ball in the centre of whiteness still carrying the fright of the cow that looked out of it when a man cut its throat. Peter kept his lips open for the eye to stare out. You ran away laughing, ran halfway along the path to Great Wishings, but I got stuck on the deadness of that great big eye staring out of Peter Moxy’s mouth. I stared down the hole of it and saw Peter Moxy himself, taller and thinner, laid out on a winding sheet, his face like chalk and his head cracked open.

‘Death’s coming for you too,’ I said. He stared at me, his face blown empty like a handful of flour in the wind. He spat the eye out on the ground.

‘Ma wants some brisket,’ I say, working hard not to meet the death stare of two hares that have twirled towards me, tied up like newlyweds.

‘That so?’ says John Clowter. ‘Your Ma happen to give you any money?’

I say nothing, because nothing is the answer, and those two naked bunnies are closer to each other than Jesus to his own cross.

‘On the slate is it?’

I nod, trying to place my eyes in safety, but there’s death hanging behind him, death twizzling in the window, death in the back room where Peter Moxy rinses pig guts for sausages and drops entrails onto pink sawdust.

John Clowter sighs, hefts a part-carcass onto his board and picks up a cleaver. He doesn’t bring the blade down. He just holds it, slicing sunlight into my eye as accidentally as his apprentice, in a few weeks, will hack off the end of his finger.

‘Your Ma’s a fine woman. Tell her I want to see her, won’t you? This will be the last bit of brisket, or anything else, until I see her.’

Nod. Down comes the cleaver.

Making my way home I get another fright, almost as bad as that pair of bald bunnies dancing in the window. Sitting on a mooring post, reading a book, is Reverend Ashburner. He’s not speaking a word, but his voice sounds in my head like the church bell. ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ he intones, though he hasn’t so much as snuck a glimpse at me, and his lips are pursed together like a oyster’s. ‘Honour thy father and mother.’

I stop like a steer snagged in a halter. A queasy feeling rising. We’d be breaking two commandments at once. He feels me there and his big cow head starts moving around to speak at me, but I pick up my knees and start running, fast as I can, running up the long steps, leaping over the half-mended net and the legs of Mister Foxwill — ‘Tyke!’ — all the way home. You’re at the door waiting for me. You catch me by my shoulders, turn me around and put my back against the wall, though I’m breathing so hard I have to bend double for a bit.

‘Best not,’ you say.

‘But the meat —’

‘She’s blazing. Listen.’

Through the door I can hear Ma arguing with someone, telling them they’re no good, a stupid dummon, a dawcake. And then the person she’s shouting at shouts back, and it’s Ma again.

‘You’ll catch the back of her hand,’ you say. ‘Or worse.’ You touch your hand against your ear, split at the top by a nail in a shoe, when you told her the truth one time. ‘Best wait till she’s done,’ you say. ‘Come on.’

You snag my fingers and we’re off up the hill, past the last of Fishtown’s doors and into the meadows. We’d stop at Guzzle Down but Old Peaty is there talking to the cows so we go further up to Great Wishings, where the witch elms take the meadow under their skirts and the sun isn’t so fearsome. I’m out of breath, not so much because of the hill or the distance, but the scare of the near-smack, which sticks in my windpipe like a fishbone.

‘Let’s sit,’ you say, and we slide our backs down the trunk of the middle elm.

‘What did Clowter give you today, then?’

You don’t mean the brisket. John Clowter wraps his joints and sausages in old broadsides. You unroll the outer layer, leaving the brisket in its pinkish inner layer on the grass, and start trying to make out the words. Mister Lampard’s been schooling you. He says boys go further if they can read themselves out of trouble. After wrestling broke him, he took the King’s sixpence in Plymouth. While he was at sea, he met a schoolmaster who’d been pressed into service to get out of debtor’s prison and that man taught him his letters. The navy was worse than slavery, Mister Lampard said, and he never would have joined if he could read. So he’s saving you from slavery with the alphabet. And now you’re hungry for scrawl and type, and the meat wrappers with their old news.

‘Hey, it’s a hanging one, and there’s a ballad! To the tune of Digby’s Farewell, it says.’

‘Who’s hanged?’ I say. ‘What did he do?’

‘Not he! A woman! A woman!’ More excited to think of someone getting hoisted out of her skirts — just for the difference — you read jerkily: ‘The Trial and Execution of Mary Caistor, Who Suffered Death This Morning at the County Jail, Horsemonger Lane, Southwark, for the murder of her husband. Shall I sing the ballad?’

Most often I say yes to your singing, but today there’s a chill in me at the thought of it and I put my hand on your arm and pull it down so the broadside lowers out of your eye line and the only thing you can read is my face.

‘What’s the matter, Tyke?’

‘It’s a sin,’ I say. ‘It’s against two commandments. Thou shalt not kill is one, and honour thy father and mother the other. The man is my father whether he meant to be or not, and we will be sinning whether we’re caught or not, and if we’re caught we’ll be hanged, and if we’re hanged we’ll go to Hell.’

You laugh. You say, ‘None of that will happen.’

But I keep my eyes on yours the way a dog looks at a man’s dinner.

‘All right,’ you say. ‘You’re scared. You don’t have to do it. I’ll do it alone.’

‘But then you’ll sin and get caught and hanged and go to Hell, and if that happens —‘

I am already crying just from making that happen in my head.

‘Shush now, I won’t be caught.’

‘And then you’ll be in a ballad, but I’ll not be able to read it.’

‘They’ll never make a ballad out of me. Not a hanging ballad, anyway.’

I grip onto you very tightly, like you’re already dead. I cry the tears that will wake you up again, like a fairy story. You laugh and shuck me off.

‘Get away with you!’

You put the broadside down and an arm around me. You take me through it: the rope pulled taut by the harbour wall, a sploosh in the dark, and another drunken sailor drowns a few feet from land, like three others already that I can remember. For having the cast of an accident I like the plan well enough, but I don’t know how you’ll get my father on his own, when sailors go around so much together, especially when they are swaying drunk and singing their way home.

‘He likes a woman, don’t he?’ you say. ‘Likes to get a woman alone and knock her lights out and put a baby in her? When he’s properly in his cups, I’ll get a note to him that there’s a woman wants to see him.’

‘Does he know English?’

‘I’ll show him,’ you say, and you strip your arm out from me to show me the mime, which needs both hands.

‘Looks like you’re selling apples.’

‘Shut your tatie trap!’

You leap up to do it better, swinging hips side to side too, and I suppose it wouldn’t take too much thinking to make your mime into a woman.

‘What about the commandments?’

You slide your back down onto the tree trunk again, right next to me.

‘It’s still sinning,’ I say, ‘even if you don’t get caught.’

You put your head against the tree and your knee starts jiggling. You say,

‘Don’t our soldiers kill every day in the name of the king? Are they told they are sinners and will go to Hell? No, they’re given eight ounces of dried beef and a pound loaf and quart of beer daily, a blanket for their beds and the king’s face in their purses.’

‘But they kill our enemies.’

‘Where in the Bible does it say “Thou shalt not kill, except if they’re your enemies”? Who decides who are the friends and who are the enemies? Not long ago, Mister Lampard says, we were killing the Dutch. The Dutch were the enemy. Now we have a Dutch king and fight shoulder to shoulder with the butter-bags.’

I take a big breath, wanting to speak, but the words don’t come straight away. There’s a wind stirring the tree above us. You start up again.

‘The way they give us these rules, and say they are God’s rules, but go by whatever rules they like, I say this is all stories, all nonsense, to keep us in our place and them in theirs. Lady Upton travels all ways and none in her coach and horses. But Peter Moxy’s feet grew out of his one pair of shoes when he was ten and he had no more until he was twelve and Mister Clowter give him some so he don’t have to stand in pig guts. Lady Upton gets a tenth of all the harvest for doing nothing at all, and old Albert Downey, who fought for King and country as boy and man, laboured in the fields until he dropped dead in a hedge. Reverend Ashburner schools us against sin before tucking into his roasted fowl every Sunday, but Millicent Peeler, thin as a willow, gets hanged for a stolen henny.’

Millicent Peeler’s name is an oath between us. Her ghost has been seen six times on Marshy Lane, white as a winding sheet. Just the thought of her chills me, but you haven’t noticed. You’re rattling on.

‘It’s one rule for the rich and another for the poor. You know how the Uptons ended up with the fat house on the hill? How they come to own all the land around here so every farmer must lease it, and give Lady Upton a measure of their grain when harvest comes?’

I try to shake the ignorance out of my head.

‘They stole it from us. From us, Tyke. This land used to be common land, belonging to every one of us, and we were free, and then the Normans invaded and took it from us.’

‘The Uptons aren’t Norman.’

‘They all are. Mister Lampard says they Englished their names, so we would think they were the same as us, and forget about them stealing our land. Them that can remember die, and new ones are born who think that’s just how it is, as if it’s God’s own order and has always been that way. They get the priests to say that it’s God’s will, too.’

‘Is it not God’s will?’

‘“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” Mister Lampard’s been all over this world, by sail and shoe-leather. He says he don’t want me walking into it with my eyes closed like he did. He says we should know that even if we don’t have a pair of boots between us, that we’re as good a human as anyone we’re supposed to bow to.’

I pluck up a piece of grass so I’ve got somewhere to put my eyes that’s not your face. I strip that piece of grass down to its core, the part that’s white and you can crunch flat between your teeth.

‘That man dishonoured our mother. Did he not covet another man’s wife? Did he not mean to kill her with that clonk to the head? And don’t those who tell us to obey the commandments break them themselves?’

That little stem of grass can’t hold me safe from you any longer. I look into your face and it’s as fierce and bright as the sun itself, burning the truth into me: the truth about who we are, and what we could be. And like a spark leaping from a tinderbox onto a field of high August wheat, you set a blaze in me. A blaze that might burn down the whole field of my life.

Some of them have existed as men.

Infamous 18^th-century pirate Mary Read tells of her previous life as a soldier and wife in this powerful novel by the award-winning author of The Marlowe Papers.

Contents

Port Royal, Jamaica. 18 November 1720.

BOOK 1.

Broxholme, Devon. 1696-97.

London, England. 1697-1705.

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Chapter 1

The Reckon-Pence is Not Money

We are the Tadpole Kings of Guzzle Down, Rat Masters of the Pantry, Grand Under-Tablers of the Blue Anchor, and we are preparing for murder.

My father is rolling a barrel of salt-beef towards the loading area. We are making ourselves small behind Mister Lampard’s whelk stall. Mister Lampard is on the dockside letting shouts rain on his head. The shouting man — a captain from his hat — is so red he could burst into flames. He is my father’s captain. Though his words are loud they mean nothing to us.

‘Dutch,’ you whisper.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Look at his shoes.’

There is only one shoe I can see, perched on the rail of the ship like a leather bird. A leather bird with a stockinged leg growing out of it. To me it looks no different than the shoes English captains wear, but because you are a year older than me and many beatings wiser, I trust your eye and begin to see a certain Dutchness in the way the toe curls.

Mister Lampard is pointing at my father and saying something not very polite. I ask you what it means. You know everything, is what I think about you then. That is why I trust you when you say we will have to kill the man who has finished rolling the salt-beef barrel along the dockside: has turned it onto its end.

‘Couldn’t Mister Lampard kill him for us?’ I ask.

His belly hangs over his belt like two loaves-worth of dough, but Mister Lampard used to wrestle for money.

‘It’s not for Mister Lampard to take revenge for Ma,’ you say. ‘If he wasn’t clever about it, he would be hanged.’

‘Won’t we be hanged?’ A boy our age was hanged at the Heavitree gallows for setting fire to a hayrick.

‘We will be clever about it,’ you say. ‘We will make it an accident.’

This is how we will erase the fear on our mother’s face. This is how we will cancel the sin of my making. I always knew I was born out of sin, because sometimes drink would make Ma say so. But I never knew how until yesterday, when she came back from buying the leftover catch tearful, with an empty basket. She said nothing to us, but everything to Mister Lampard, which is the same as to us when we have our ears to the boards. Forced in a dark stairwell, she said. Mister Lampard said there there, not asking for details, but she told him anyway, though what she said wasn’t much: the smell of rum and a knock to the head.

‘How do you know it’s him?’ Mister Lampard asked.

‘The tally tattoo on his arm,’ she said.

That inky five-bar gate we catch a flash of as he stands there, wiping his brow. A tally of ladies knocked on the head, maybe.

‘Will we kill him now?’ I ask.

A laugh huffs from your nostrils.

‘That wouldn’t be clever.’

We watch the man waddle back onto the boat. He has the long-time sailors’ walk, side to side, as if he is still at sea. Mister Lampard stomps back towards us. The Dutch captain is still shouting, throwing his words to land like spit on Mister Lampard’s head. Mister Lampard says,

‘Miserable old ______!’

Whatever the last word means, I am eager to learn it. He follows up with a string of oaths. Then our ears fill with gull-caw and boat-creak, waves slapping the wooden jetty, because Mister Lampard’s got all his anger out.

Later, he’s having supper with us. Whelks in gravy, and the bread Ma baked yesterday, which sticks to the top part of my mouth like a lie. They are talking about reckon-pence. Which is money you pay someone to atone for a sin. Ma is crying.

‘My languages ain’t good enough, Margret,’ says Mister Lampard. ‘I told the Cap-n he should pay for the littlun. I say to him, your man, your man, but he thinks I mean him. So I point at the man who - forgive me, Margret, we all know what he done - and I do a mime.’

It’s true. We saw the mime. Mister Lampard standing on the dockside wobbling his tarriwags like a dog on the butcher’s leg. A laugh burst out of me, I couldn’t stop it, and you might have told me off except one burst out of you too. But then, because Mister Lampard’s mime wasn’t silly enough to stop it being wrong that a sailor hit Ma over the head to make a baby, and we were supposed to be hiding, you made your face serious and nodded at me to be cross again, so I was. Now I check across the table to see if you’re remembering the mime. But you’re scraping a piece of bread around your plate, pushing the gravy into the middle, which means you’re listening very hard and pretending not to. Mister Lampard has Ma’s hand and is filling her ears with words.

‘So I says, keep the blunderbuss on the ship. So he don’t go off on some other woman. But the Cap-n says “All men must drink.” That’s all he says, Margret. “All men must drink.”’

Ma’s tears are falling silently into her lap. She’s looking at her hand in Mister Lampard’s. A mouse in a trap. Curled up soft, like it’s dying in Mister Lampard’s big bed of a hand, his fingers closed over hers.

‘I did what I could,’ he says.

When you’ve mopped up all the gravy, and shoved me your last bit of bread beneath the table, Ma shoos us into the rafters. It’s hot, as if all Ma’s fuss has nested up there like a fluster of pigeons. The mattress feels extra itchy under my shoulder, like some of the straw is poking through but when I complain you say it’s my thoughts that are itchy. You always know my thoughts, as if we really were the twins that strangers take us to be.

‘Does he look like me?’ I say. ‘Do I look like him?’

‘Maybe when he was a scrap he looked like you.’

If he was ever a scrap, he was a bruising scrap, the kind who fights out of his swaddling and punches his Ma on the nose.

‘Do you look like your Da?’ I say, and then I’m sorry, because he’s been a long time at sea and we’re not supposed to talk about him.

‘Ma says so,’ you say with armour in your voice, and I’m doubly sorry. It’s so long since he last went to sea that all we have of him is his name, Read, which all of us wear like a brand of belonging, even if he’s shaken us off, or the sea has shaken him out of his skin. I’ve wondered whether he’s looking down on us all from sailor heaven, which Mister Lampard says is blue skies, a fair wind, and an ocean of rum. But the new story is gnawing at me like a crab on bacon rind.

‘Maybe he didn’t come back because he didn’t believe Ma about the stairwell and the knock on the head,’ I say. ‘He’s at sea, you say,’ in a flat voice that means Don’t you even think anything else.

For a while after that you don’t speak and I wonder if you’ve fallen asleep, though your breathing is noiseless. A shanty starts up in the tavern across the street. I wonder if Mister Lampard is leading it because it’s Maid of Amsterdam but that would be unkind to Ma and anyway I hear him grunting downstairs, like he’s lifting something heavy. More likely it’s down to the Dutch ship being in harbour. When the song gets to the bit where the Great Big Dutchman Rammed My Bow you say,

‘We can’t do anything about my dad, but we can do something about yours.’ You don’t need my nodding in the dark, which is only to soothe the prickly thoughts my head, like a kind of rocking. You are talking more to yourself than anything when you say, ‘I have a plan.’

Only half of me wants to hear this plan of yours. The other half wants to hide under the blanket and muffle you out. But you’re my brother, so I ask you,

‘What?’

There’s a big pause like you didn’t have a plan at all and are thinking it up right on the spot. There’s moonlight coming through the gap in the eaves and I can just see the edge of your face, drawn in silver. Your eyes close, and open.

‘We will kill him when he’s drunk.’

You wait as if I am meant to ask how but I am worried about the ‘we’. I have never killed so much as a beetle. I don’t know how not to be part of your ‘we’ because we do mostly everything together, so I ask,

‘What about the reckon-pence?’

You sit up in the dark, like your hair was pulled. You say death is reckon-pence enough. You say everyone who dies gets their reckoning, because of Judgement Day, and best my father gets in line for his sooner before he knocks any more women over the head and makes babies on them. Your plan has made you all twitchy and now you’re out of bed and pulling on your breeches. It looks like I might be excused from your ‘we’ because you’re not asking me to get dressed as well, but I’m still worried about the money. Ma told Mister Lampard to get money off him, because it’s hard to feed two littluns on what she makes from sewing. I’m thinking if she only feeds one it won’t be the one whose father smacked her on the mazzard.

‘But the money,’ I say.

‘She won’t be afraid to walk around Fishtown.’ Tying the cord around your waist. ‘And that’s worth a few bob.’

So it’s decided. You, or maybe we, will kill my father when he’s drunk, and leave God to sort out the reckon-pence.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Scouting. You get some sleep.’

I lie awake for a long time waiting for you to come back but all I hear is mouse-scritch. Outside, the tavern roars and then quiets, roars and then quiets, in waves like the sea itself. In the quiet I hear, high on St Mary’s hill, the murdered-woman shriek of a fox. Voices leave the tavern in clusters of holler and laughter. The fox is done with its horror and quiet gets thick as soup. A lonely song wobbles itself up the street.

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Life Shows Up to Say Goodbye

The walk to the gallows is a feast of sensation. Nothing lets you know you’re alive like Death at your shoulder. Prodded up some badly-carpented steps, your wrists bound in sisal, your ankles hobbled with iron cuffs chained together, to a platform where your extinction twirls in the breeze in a loop ahead of you. On the fifth step, the protruding slant of a nailhead knocked in by some fellow not caring too much about the finish. Not caring too much about who’d be going up these steps and not coming down again. That slant nail groans through the grain of a tree chopped down and planked to bear your weight, its wood striped with every year it grew. A tree once slender as a finger. Its whole future contained in a seed you could put in your mouth and swallow.

Life shows up to say goodbye. Last taste! says the brain, that roguish companion who steered you into so many holes. Drink it in! says the old thinker. Meaning eyes and ears and nose and every hair on your body but what you have the most thirst for is air. You suck it deep into your lungs and despite the sun already fierce on your skin, the air comes in cool because the wind is running in strong from the sea. If your eyes are thirsty, nature rises up to satisfy them, willing as that sweet wench at the Fortune. Colours as vivid as they’ve ever been, any day of your life. Last moments! they shout. Nature puts on a show for those about to fertilise it, whether hung in cages over the water or dug into the ground. Nature gives thanks with yellows so yellow they punch you in the throat. Paragreets screeching laughter in the trees, green as limes. Hibiscus flowers red as a whore’s dress. The sky so blue and wide and empty it makes you want to weep for your mother, even if she never much loved you and often wished you unborn. The whole crowd gathered to watch you die ripples like a field of wheat. Behind them, bleached and clustering huts, and behind the huts, the sea shushing you with its ancient song. That old keeper of your history, laying itself over the beach again and again saying miss me, miss me.

The Governor comes out of the low white building where he has been putting on his braids and fakery — the costume required to kill with authority and without penalty.

‘Desperate men all!’ says a woman in the crowd. From what I saw in the wagon from Spanish Town, there’s little in anyone’s face to confirm her pronouncement. Featherstone looked as peaceable as if he were about to lay His Bonyness down to sleep for the night. Davies and Howl, who count laughter their chief rebellion, were grinning like children about to be caned. Absent in thought, Bonny’s head nodded with the ruts of the road like every bump was a yes. Squire Corner held a face as smooth as a lake, his thoughts invisible under the surface.

I could not look at Rackham.

Then we were bundled out and two uniformed men, who besides their uniforms seemed more roguish than any of us, prodded us into an order, wishing the least of us hanged first and the ones deemed the rascaliest rascals last, so that we might die from left to right, as though we are a sentence building to an exclamation mark. So much do they love hierarchy that they must write us into it even at death. So Davies and Howl were prodded up first to be hanged on the left as the crowd sees it, and then Bonny and myself as the fiercest fighters, and then Squire Corner, because he is Quartermaster, and His Bonyness, Featherstone, as Sailing Master, and finally Rackham, the captain who never set himself above any of us.

Gallows Point is a fine place to die, with the Fort that once surrounded it dropped into the sea by a quake many moons ago. Why hang men here, circled in the arms of the sea, and nature pushing up wild through the brick and stone? To show us what we are losing. To remind us what we will decorate when our bodies are caged and displayed, on the approach to Jamaica, until we are skeletons. Which in this rich rotting clime will not be long. The smallest injury will fester hard, as anyone knows.

Every inch of this life is a wonder. Not only the tigerish butterflies broader than your palm, or the flame-feathered birds, but the sand flies that seemingly pop in and out of existence and the small child emptying their bowels by the powder store. Goodness yes, human beings, with all their idiocy and brilliance, constructors and destroyers of the world, masters of engineering and victims of feeling. What perspective I am granted now, as I wait for my hanging. The world made suddenly vivid and jewel-like. Here is the treasure, in our hands all along, that never needed to be raided or robbed.

Is this why I change my mind?

Brother, I swear, I was ready to die. Was determined to go with my crew.

But the body has no desire to be quitted. Filled to overflowing with something whose word I hardly dare say, a word often used narrowly and often abused, so universally longed for, so seemingly hard to come upon, but right at my end it charges fiercely through my body: love. Unending and boundless love. For everything. For everyone. Even that ridiculous Governor climbing up to his separate podium to address the crowd. Love of this life, that is what changes me, riffling through my body. Every pipe and tube vigorous with fluids, wanting me to run, or wanting to run out of me. Every hair on my skin raised up like an army of soldiers stood to attention. There are words that would save my neck. And now it is everything I can do to hold on to them.

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